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Thursday, July 26, 2007

enlarge Staff photo by Jim Evans

Hot breakfast is served every morning at Wilton's Cushing School.

enlarge Staff photo by Jim Evans

Wilton principal Darlene Paine.

enlarge Staff graphic by Sharon Wood

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Pamela Brooks.

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Christine Harrington.

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Fourth in a 7-day series

“Learning is difficult because hungry stomachs and languid bodies and thin blood are not able to feed the brain ... It is utter folly, from the point of view of learning, to have a compulsory school law which compels children, in that weak physical and mental state which results from poverty, to drag themselves to school and to sit at their desks, day in and day out, for several years, learning little or nothing. If it is a matter of principle in democratic America that every child shall be given a certain amount of instruction, let us render it possible for them to receive it.” — Robert Hunter, Poverty, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1905

Many of Maine’s children are hungry. There is a way that we can substantially alleviate that hunger — but it will take hard work, and up until now, it’s something that we have chosen not to do as well as we could.

That must change.

We must feed them breakfast at school.

And if we alleviate that hunger, then we can — as Robert Hunter urged more than 100 years ago in his seminal book on poverty in America — render it possible for many more of our children to do what they must do: learn, so they can become fully contributing members of society.

Eighty percent of the Maine families receiving food stamps are families with children. It is widely acknowledged that food stamps can only supplement a meager food budget. The average food stamp benefit is $1 per meal — $3 total per day — hardly enough to cover the costs of an adequate diet of nutritious food.

That’s where school nutrition programs come in.

Those nutrition programs have a long history. Responding to widespread poverty and hunger, attempts were made by charities in the 19th and early 20th century in Boston, Cleveland, New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles and other cities to establish food services for children and students.

In 1946, the national school lunch program was created by Congress after military leaders in World War II saw how poor nutrition had weakened many of the country’s youth so badly that they were unfit to serve. The Congressional declaration of policy said the program was created to provide “a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities.”

The current school lunch program sets nutritional guidelines for meals served to children. The cost of virtually every school meal is subsidized by the federal government, but within the school lunch program is a smaller program that provides free and reduced lunches for children whose families are poor enough to qualify. The federal government gives cash and agricultural commodities to schools to cover the cost of each meal served to children participating in the program.

The reduced and free lunch program has been widely hailed as a success across the country, where it’s often the one nutritious meal a child will have all day long.

BETTER PERFORMANCE

But here’s the problem that we have so far been unwilling to address as a state and solve: Every child needs more than one nutritious meal a day to grow and function. Breakfast is a crucial part of a child’s daily nutritional intake.

Yet while the school lunch program reaches many Maine students, the more recently established federal school breakfast program does not.

That means a lot of children who could be getting the most important and nutritious meal of the day aren’t. Regardless of the fact that research has demonstrated that breakfast is indeed the most important meal of the day and that students who get it perform better than students who do not, fewer than half of the hungry Maine students who could be getting school breakfasts actually get it.

During the 2005-2006 school year, 735 Maine schools served reduced or free school lunches. The average daily number of students getting reduced or free lunch was 52,000 students out of the total daily average of 108,000 students altogether who got school lunch.

But only a few more than 600 schools serve breakfast. More to the point, for every 100 Maine students who get a free or reduced lunch, only 43 students also get a free or reduced breakfast. That means there are many children who are likely to show up in school malnourished, with behavior problems and unable to learn.

You could argue that it’s the parents’ responsibility to feed their children a good breakfast. You could argue that breakfast is an important family time that should be promoted by social policy. And in the time that it would take — years, surely — to figure out a way to get enough money to families so that they had the resources to put a good breakfast on the table every morning, or to teach enough adults the skills to be good parents, you could have fed a lot of children breakfast at school.

It’s not a simple problem to solve: School administrators say that while the federal government will pay for the food, the cost and inconvenience of changing both bus and class schedules to accommodate serving breakfast, as well as to serve the food, is prohibitive.

“There are community members and board members that say, ‘Enough with being the parents to these kids, we have to draw the line someplace,’” says Carol Hathorne, former principal of Maranacook Middle School as well as an administrator in Lisbon and Waterville schools. Hathorne is now principal at Hope Elementary School, where breakfast is not served.

“We have a very low free and reduced rate ... we don’t presently have the neediest population ... we haven’t had the interest among our families in getting the breakfast program going, most of our students are bused students, we don’t have recess before school, buses arrive when school starts ... you need to have enough staff to have breakfast ready and lunch as well,” she says. “But I also know that kids learn better if they have a full tummy, that’s what I’d like to see happen.”

WARRIOR FOR HUNGRY KIDS

There is a man who’d like to make breakfast happen at every school in the state: Ron Adams, a self-effacing former professional chef who has become an unlikely warrior for the cause of feeding Maine’s schoolchildren a nutritious breakfast. The ginger-haired, boyish and shy Adams is head of the Maine School Nutrition Association, the organization that represents all Maine’s school food professionals. His day job is to run the school food programs in Gorham’s schools — he turned to school food service work when his hours as a chef conflicted with raising a family. Adams came to Gorham after running food programs for several schools in Portland’s poorest areas.

In most of the Portland schools he served, almost all of the students were eligible for free or reduced lunch — and Adams found himself wondering what happened to those children when summer rolled around and they didn’t have school food to feed them.

“I’d serve them for 30 weeks,” he says, “and then what would they do?”

So in 1992 he established the non-profit East End Kids Katering to feed those students during the summer. In an accomplishment that could be deemed a noble life’s great achievement, the program ultimately fed 1,200 children a day at 10 sites and has now expanded to feed children year-round in day cares, as well as needy seniors.

But Adams says his work is not done.

Like many of the state’s school food professionals, he’s not just in it for the job. He has a strong desire to feed children and an unfed child, anywhere, appears to be a painful assault on his sense of justice. What’s got Adams upset and motivated is the fact that only 43 percent of Maine children get subsidized lunch. That’s a very big missed opportunity to get good, nutritious food into children who lack it, he says.

Adams believes that every school in Maine should feed breakfast to as many children as possible. Why?

“Thirty percent of our kids are apt not to be eating well at home so they need the help available so they can do well at school. They can’t do well if they’re hungry ... When we take care of the kids, then they can get educated and break the cycle,” he says.

That’s a message Adams has brought to the Statehouse, where he’s lobbied on behalf of the school nutrition association for increased state support for school breakfast programs — a small appropriation was just passed by the state Legislature. It’s a message he’s brought to his local school board which has agreed to promote an expanded school breakfast in the Gorham schools. And it’s a message he wants school administrators across the state to hear.

TOO MUCH TO ASK

But for many school administrators struggling with conflicting bus schedules, overworked teachers, tight budgets and not enough time in the day to teach everything that must be taught, providing breakfast to children — despite its demonstrated benefits — is asking too much. Regardless of the fact that students will likely perform better if they get breakfast at school, the logistics and effort required to put on the breakfast are just too daunting for some.

“There are many schools that just can’t find the way to do it,” says Adams, shaking his head.

“The principal will say ‘I’m not going to juggle my schedule,’ teachers jealously guard what goes on in the morning because it’s optimal performance time. And if only 15 percent of kids are food insecure in the district, they lose that battle in a very constrained school day.”

Walter Beesley, a veteran staffer in the state’s child nutrition programs, where he now administers the federal lunch and breakfast programs, agrees.

“Schools don’t want to do it,” he says. “Everyone’s worried about the money issue and not what’s the need of students.”

Even school breakfast advocates like Cushing School Principal Darlene Paine, who instituted a hot breakfast at her school, says, “Breakfast takes at least 20 minutes out of instructional time. Just how much are schools expected to do for families? That’s not why we were started, and more and more we have to pick up and help society.”

Yet Curley and many other school leaders across the country recognize that providing school breakfast is a crucial tool in ensuring not only the adequate nutrition of their students, but also maximum academic performance.

“What we find particularly exciting is that this is a relatively simple intervention that can significantly improve children’s academic performance and psychological well-being,” says Michael Murphy, who researches school breakfast programs at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Some school districts and even states have simply eliminated the reduced price breakfast; making all breakfasts free dramatically increases participation.

New Mexico tested a program to provide breakfast in the classroom to all children in certain schools that failed the No Child Left Behind Act’s Adequate Yearly Progress measures. The program expanded to 129 elementary schools this past year. In Oregon, a program in a number of schools to offer breakfast at no charge during the first 10-15 minutes of class almost tripled the number of children eating breakfast in one pilot school. Late-arriving students dropped from a daily average of 35 to seven; staffers at one school in the program report that morning student trips to the nurse have been eliminated.

In Maine, expanding the school breakfast program to even 60 percent of the eligible children would mean 9,000 more school children would eat breakfast and the state’s schools would get $1.8 million in federal money to pay for the additional meals.

“It’s deciding what the priority is for school nutrition,” repeats Adams. “It just has to be a priority for us to do.”

We differ from Adams in only one regard: This issue isn’t simply about deciding what the priority is for school nutrition.

It’s about deciding whether we have the will, ingenuity and commitment to overcome obstacles to feeding our children the food they need and deserve.

We cannot imagine that there is a single school administrator in Maine who would publicly say that the problems they face are so great that they must deny children a meal that is largely paid for by federal money. Budgets are indeed tight, instructional time is precious — but a hungry child is hard to educate and, more profoundly, a hungry child is a rebuke to our collective sense of decency.

Maine must mandate that all schools which serve reduced and free lunch should also serve reduced and free school breakfast. Maine must further mandate that outreach efforts be conducted to ensure the maximum possible participation by students.

Breakfast need not be served in precisely the way we serve lunch in our schools; districts in other states have mounted successful pilot programs where children grab breafast packets from a kiosk and eat in class. Surprisingly to some — but not to others — this has resulted in less classroom distraction early in the morning and more serious attention given by children to their studies.

There are logistical and even financial obstacles to doing this. But they are not compelling enough to overcome the moral and educational imperative to feed our children.

Tomorrow: An army of angels.

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