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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

enlarge Staff photo by Jim Evans

Katie Hallman, of Wilton.

enlarge Staff photo by Jim Evans

HEALTHY FOOD EXPENSIVE: Harmonie Hagerman says she feels fortunate that she learned to be a thrifty and creative cook from her mother because healthy food is expensive. She said the fresh zucchini and squash for her family's dinner cost more than the chicken. With her in the kitchen is her husband Carlton Trott and youngest daughter Delia.

enlarge Staff graphic by Sharon Wood

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from the Kennebec Journal

BRACING FOR CUTS
Bull killed in Chelsea field; night hunting suspected
HALLOWELL Shea takes on role as interim manager
Vigil set for crash victim
WEST GARDINER CHARITY IN A SHOE BOX
Hartland man dies battling fire; 'no replacing him'
Brewers to make decision on Rogers
WINTER PRACTICES UNDER WAY

All of today's: News | Sports
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Today's Top Headlines
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Officials to brainstorm on energy
License probe leads to indictment
Fireman collapses at fire, dies later
Waterville, Winslow back school plan revision
SKOWHEGAN Pit stop reopens in spot next door
ADOPTION LAW TO TAKE EFFECT
Brewers must make decision on Rogers
Switching gears for new season

All of today's: News | Sports
from the Morning Sentinel

Third in a 7-day series

If you want to know about hunger in Maine, look in the top left-hand drawer of Margot Caswell’s oak desk.

That’s where you’ll find a small box made of yarn and canvas, topped with a purple and green flower.

You could imagine a little girl keeping hair ties in it.

But those are not what Caswell keeps in her pink box.

She keeps meals in it.

Meals for her hungry students.

Caswell has $4.26 crammed into this tiny box — money that she and the other teachers in this Augusta classroom take from their own pockets because they can’t bear to see their students go without the food they need. Money to buy food for children who come to school without breakfast, who haven’t eaten dinner the night before. Money that they hand over — with equal parts love and frustration — every time they get a paycheck or have some spare change.

“Every single day at school there are kids who are hungry, so hungry that they’re sick to their stomach and have headaches,” says Caswell.

“It makes me crazy, so I go out and buy them food.”

Margot Caswell’s yarn box is a sweet little tragedy, a place where private kindness meets society’s failure. The box’s few cubic inches of volume, stuffed with crumpled dollar bills and a handful of coins, represent one of the most terrible realities of life in Maine: That there are many parents who cannot afford to feed their children and must send them to school hungry.

Caswell says that in the special education class she teaches, one out of four of her students is hungry — all the time. That’s not a statistic, it’s living, breathing children who don’t have the vitamins they need to grow right, the calories they need to think right, the nutrition they need to make their way in the world, whole and fully functioning.

It’s a reality Caswell has had to fight in her own life.

When she moved to Maine in 1989, fleeing a bad relationship and with two children in tow, she cleaned houses and took classes as the first step toward entering college.

“My kids were on free and reduced lunch, and I got some assistance with food stamps and there was a food pantry we used to go to occasionally in Norridgewock,” she says.

Later, she and the children moved to Massachusetts so she could earn a degree in social work and criminal justice, and she needed food stamps again to feed her kids.

“Food stamps saved our lives,” she says.

Today, while Caswell may have escaped poverty through hard work and determination, her teaching job puts her right in the thick of the problems she used to endure herself.

Caswell is taking a break from her special education class at Augusta’s Lincoln School and sitting in the principal’s office. A large woman who radiates patience and warmth, her normally soft voice gets reedy and strained as she talks about her students’ welfare.

“At least four come from families where the only food they get is what they get here at school,” she says. “The ones who have food are well-groomed, more awake. The others? It’s about their hunger. I have two children who will come in and be just off — rude, disrespectful. And then I find out about 10 a.m. that they’re hungry. I go to the cafeteria and get them breakfast.

“I don’t think people understand how bad it is,” says Caswell. “They’re hungry.”

So hungry that, despite their own limited means, Caswell and her classroom’s education technicians all put their own money into that small yarn box in her desk every payday. The money they stuff into the jar pays for Caswell to buy food for her hungry students.

“I take kids out to eat — these are kids who’ve never been to a restaurant, some of them. We go where they want, to McDonalds, Burger King, Applebees and Chinese,” she says. It’s a revelation for the children, a treat that they’ve never, or rarely experienced, and Caswell uses the outings educationally, too, as a reward for progress in the classroom. In the end, she says, the return is greater than the cost: “It doesn’t take all that much to help; $10 is nothing, really.”

IT'S NOT THEIR FAULT

From York County up to Aroostook, from the western mountains to the coast, children in Maine aren’t getting enough nutritious food and it’s teachers like Caswell and school staff who see that hunger daily. Caswell’s not alone in getting agitated when she talks of her students’ welfare.

Vicki Dill is another one.

“Go to any school,” says Dill, “and you’ll see hunger.”

Dill is the kitchen manager at the Jefferson School. She says there are rules that prevent her from giving out extra food in the cafeteria breakfast and lunch lines. But when she hears the Dickensian plea, “Please, can I have some more,” she’ll readily “look the other way” and allow kids to have seconds and even thirds.

“I can’t see kids go hungry,” she says. “It’s not their fault.”

The most widely used indicator of how many children lack adequate food is the number of children eligible for federally-subsidized free and reduced price meals in school (a free breakfast or lunch is, of course, free; the maximum schools can charge for reduced price breakfast is 30 cents, and the maximum for a reduced price lunch is 40 cents).

The meal must meet federal nutritional guidelines, as all school meals must, including limited fat content.

In 2006, out of a total of 199,000 students in the state, a little more than 54,000 were eligible for free meals; another 15,000 were eligible for reduced price meals.

In Kennebec County, 29 percent of students in the year 2000 were eligible for free and reduced meals. That climbed to 37 percent this year. Likewise, in 2000, 27 percent of Lincoln County schoolchildren were eligible for subsidized meals; this year, it was 37 percent. While those percentages aren’t broken down by the Department of Education into reduced and free percentages, staff there say that the ratio of free to reduced in a county is at least 2-to-1, and can reach above 3-to-1.

Pamela Huntington, who runs the food program in the Richmond schools, has seen it all, as she notes in an email:

“I certainly can attest to many stories of students commenting on being hungry over the weekends, especially the three-day weekends. Also, many come to school usually toward the end of the week ... and will speak very freely on how they are sooooooo hungry as their parents/parent can't get groceries until payday, so both breakfast & lunch are most important and needed those days ... Students often will mention they are glad to be going on vacation ... but they will miss us because they probably will only have one meal per day ... there are many who are so anxious to have breakfast, because after they have lunch, their only dinner meal maybe cereal, chip & dip ... one even told me, he couldn't sleep all night because his dad had brought home half of his lunch from work for supper and he was soooo hungry he couldn't wait to get to have breakfast!”

Talk to almost any school employee who sees hunger among students, and you’ll get an earful of both sympathy and frustration.

Sympathy because they hate to see their charges suffering; frustration because they know hunger and learning don’t go together.

“A full tummy means better focus,” says Pamela Brooks, a second-grade teacher at Wilton’s Cushing School. Sitting around a table in an administration office with a few other teachers, school nurse Katie Hallman and principal Darlene Paine, Brooks’ equation of good nutrition with good school performance is echoed by Hallman.

“We obviously know that,” says Hallman. “That’s why we feed them before tests.

“I say, you feed them on those days — feed them every day.”

Teachers routinely lay out money to feed hungry students. Caswell’s not the only Maine school employee who digs into her own pocket, and Dill’s not the only employee who breaks school rules to feed hungry children.

In Wilton’s Cushing School, kindergarten teacher Christine Harrington says she spends a “good $10-$15 weekly” on nutritious snacks — peanut butter and crackers, usually — for her students.

Tales of missing meals and bare pantries haunt the Cushing School’s staff. “One little boy came in and said, ‘Dad only had two apples in the house,’” says Harrington.

“I walked into the food pantry at Thanksgiving and I was totally blown away at all the names of my students’ families,” she adds.

Both the numbers and precentages of hungry children are growing, says Ron Adams, the Gorham schools’ food service director and president of the Maine School Food Service Association.

“The number of kids enrolled in schools in Maine has gone down,” says Adams, but at the same time, “the free and reduced population went up.”

Why is this happening? For those who know Maine’s hungry families, the answer is simple: Wages are too low, costs — housing, fuel, electricity, medicine — are too high, and the heads of families don’t have the education or qualifications to get any further ahead.

LOW "FOOD SECURITY"

In the state’s annual report on poverty for 2007, the authors report that the federal measure of hunger — now called “low food security” or “very low food security” — reflects the worsening of hunger in Maine.

“Maine’s food security status appears to have fallen since 1996-1998,” they write, “with low food security increasing by 3.3 percentage points and very low food security increasing by 1.8 percentage points. The USDA considers these changes to be statistically significant.”

Put in simpler terms, many Maine families these days don’t have enough money for food.

“Working a minimum wage job doesn’t make ends meet,” says Jason Hall, who works for the state’s largest food bank, The Good Shepherd in Auburn, which helps supply hundreds of food pantries across the state. “In northern Maine, it’s lack of jobs, people move from Aroostook county to Portland to earn more money, but they end up worse off... It’s mill closings, people working two or three jobs — it seems like it never ends in Maine.”

And when families get that close to the edge, or over it, then they can’t feed their children.

“Oftentimes,” says Barbara Raymond, head of nutrition programs for Augusta’s schools, “we have parents working two or three jobs and still can’t make ends meet ... Some struggle as far as they can before applying. We do have kids who eat breakfast and lunch at school and do not eat again until they come back into school the next morning.”

The countywide statistics of children in need belie the even higher numbers at individual schools. In Augusta’s Gilbert School, almost 65 percent of the children qualify for free and reduced meals this year; that’s up from 62 percent in 1999. In Wilton’s Cushing School, it’s 63 percent this year; it was 45 percent in 1999. In 1999 at the St. Albans Consolidated School, 59 percent of the children qualified for subsidized meals; this year, it’s almost 73 percent of all students.

Hunger among Maine’s children is a moral problem, certainly — but it’s also an educational and economic problem. Dr. Deborah Frank is a professor of pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine who has studied the effects of inadequate nutrition on childhood.

“To educate children,” Frank told a congressional committee, “you must feed them.”

In a recent interview, Frank said hunger and inadequate nutrition lead to serious developmental and health problems for children. “They have trouble learning, trouble paying attention in school, they can be very withdrawn and weepy or very hyper and fighting,” she said. “These children can have lower IQs, more attention deficit, all the things that keep us from succeeding in a knowledge economy.”

And a study conducted by University of Michigan and Cornell scientists, published in the journal “Pediatrics” in 2001, determined that children aged six to 11 that came from families which did not get enough food to eat had “significantly lower arithmetic scores and were more likely to have repeated a grade, have seen a psychologist, and have had difficulty getting along with other children ... teenagers were more likely to ... have been suspended from school.”

HUNGRY, FAT GO TOGETHER

That so many Maine children are hungry seems to be contradicted by one obvious fact: Lots of poor children are fat.

That seeming contradiction really isn’t one, though, when you consider what it is that a limited food dollar buys. Sitting on the gritty front steps of her apartment on Augusta’s busy Cony Circle, cars whizzing past, Harmonie Hagerman listens anxiously for her baby daughter to wake up from her nap.

All’s still quiet, so the pretty 29-year-old mother of two, dressed in a sleeveless black shirt on this hot spring day, leans back on the top step. She speaks, sometimes tearfully, about how difficult it is to feed her children good food on the limited wages she and her husband earn.

Hagerman’s husband works full time for a sandwich shop in Augusta, where he earns $10.50 an hour but gets no benefits. She works 15 hours a week doing childcare at the Lincoln School and in the city’s recreation program. Both went to college, but their wages are so low that they qualify for a number of assistance programs. They get both food stamps and vouchers for infant food from the federal Women, Infants and Children program.

“Fresh vegetables are important,” says Hagerman, “but expensive. Junk food is cheaper. You want to buy a ton of ramen, feed your child on that, they’re going to get fat, they can’t gain muscle mass. If you don’t know how to cook, you end up buying frozen pizzas, two for six bucks. Of course these kids look porky, because fat is cheap.”

Hagerman concisely expresses what scientists and policy makers have also determined through lengthy observation and study: Today’s version of hunger in the United States is, as Dr. Sydney Sewall says, “nutritional deprivation, not calorie deprivation.”

Sewall, a pediatrician and head of medicine at Augusta’s MaineGeneral Health, says that cheap food is nutrition poor and calorie dense. That means that while a child may feel full after eating several cheap donuts for breakfast, and will have consumed a lot of calories in the process, two things result from that kind of diet: Children will get fat, but will not get the nutrition they need to grow and function optimally. That’s how obesity afflicts some of our hungriest children — the ones whom Sewall says suffer from “dysnutrition,” a made-up word that he uses to describe getting food, but the wrong food.

So providing good food for her family takes not only money, but hard thinking and planning, Hagerman says.

“With the food stamps we get, a lot of people don’t know how to spend them wisely. I buy large packs of chicken on sale to freeze, enough so there’s at least enough to feed Maisie (her 4 and a half year old daughter) for a month.

“Fresh vegetables are important, but expensive,” Hagerman adds, so her family’s intake is limited. But, she says, angrily, “I am not going to feed my children canned vegetables and processed food.” She’s grimly determined that even if she and her husband must go without, her children will not — even though it can cost up to $50 a week for fresh produce for her family of four.

“My children do not go hungry. I will not let that happen. My husband and I eat a lot of rice and beans. I’ve lost so much weight ... I’m hungry right now, I want a real dinner,” she says. And then, tearfully: “If we were able to do it ourselves, it would have been done — my husband and I are really smart people. I want so badly to not be in this position.”

Lack of money isn’t the only reason that many Maine children are hungry and malnourished. Teachers, social workers, government agency staffers, even other parents will say that some parents simply don’t care enough, know enough or do enough to take care of their children and feed them adequately.

“In my room,” says Lincoln School special education Caswell, “I have the kids whose parents do all that they can and they’re just not making it. Then I have the parents who half the time they care and half the time they don’t. And then I have the ones who don’t care at all.”

Hagerman says she’s seen “people who use their TANF (welfare) money to buy alcohol and cigarettes and trade for drugs” instead of buying food for their children. And at Waterville’s Alfond Youth Center, where hundreds of children are fed daily after school, assistant executive director Chuck Karter tells of children going home to prepare their own meals — “a box of Pop Tarts and 20 oreos.”

“It’s unfortunate,” says Karter. “The parents need to be able to take care of themselves before they can take care of kids. They’re either working so hard or they’re not doing anything.”

There is something we can do in Maine to make substantial progress in fighting childhood hunger and malnutrition. But it’s a move not everyone is willing to make.

Tomorrow: Breakfast for all Maine children.

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