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11/18/2007

Between 2001-2003, 9.2 percent of Maine households experienced hunger; during the 2004-2006 period, that number jumped to 12.9 percent. That's 168,000 people.

The surveys asked people about how much they spend on food, whether they use food assistance programs, and if they have problems paying for enough food for their household.

State officials were quick to point out that all this happened while food stamp distribution had increased in Maine as well.

That doesn't contradict what the feds found. When food stamp benefits are only $1 per meal, and when a family of three isn't eligible for them if their monthly wages go above $1,385, that leaves a lot of working people without enough money to pay for nutritious food for their families. Anybody who's ever stood in a supermarket checkout line and tried to balance their checkbook later knows that.

WAGES AREN'T KEEPING UP

The reasons are obvious. Food costs more now than it did four years ago. So does fuel. Housing costs are rising. But wages aren't keeping up.

Maine's economy has been in a prolonged period of slow growth, with no employment growth during the last few years.

Our economy has stalled and during that stall the middle- to low-income wage earners experienced zero to negative real wage growth, according to former state economist Laurie Lachance.

In the end, the cost of living outpaced many Mainers' incomes.

That means families that don't know where their next meal will come from, children who go to school hungry and elderly people who don't get enough food to stay healthy.

The answers are also obvious: We need better jobs that pay better wages, and we need educated Maine workers trained to fill those jobs. Those on food stamps need more generous benefits, and they shouldn't lose their food stamps as they work their way out of poverty.

But those are long-term fixes. In the short term, there is a guaranteed and relatively simple answer to how we can get more food into the mouths of Maine's hungry children.

BREAKFAST AT SCHOOL

That answer is found between 7:40 and 8:10 every weekday morning in the high-ceilinged, brightly lit and cheerful cafeteria at Winthrop Grade School. Every morning, children run, shuffle or bounce into the room and are greeted with the smell of muffins, cinnamon rolls, waffle sticks, eggs or pancakes. There's a cooler with cartons of milk and juice, there's fresh fruit and cereal in another display case, and there's the ever-present cafeteria manager Kathy Dunn, standing at the end of the breakfast line, checking each child out with a smile and an, "All set, honey?"

These children come mostly from families that can't afford to pay for school meals.

Almost 32 percent of the children at Winthrop Grade School are eligible for free and reduced price meals; the majority of those are eligible for the free meals. Those meals are paid for by the federal government, though there are labor costs to prepare and set up the meals, which are borne by the school.

Between 80 and 105 children eat breakfast at Winthrop Grade School every Monday through Friday. Backpacks shoved under their chairs, the kids eat, talk, gulp down their milk and juice, laugh, eat some more and then fly out like little tornadoes to their homerooms -- ready to learn.

This scene should be repeated in every single school in Maine. Yet it is not.

While six out of seven Maine schools offer breakfast, fewer than half the children eligible for free and reduced meals at school get that breakfast. And teachers will tell you: A hungry child can't learn.

2 REASONS FOR THE LACK

There are two major reasons why Maine's hungry schoolchildren aren't getting the breakfasts to which they are entitled.

The first is that some school administrators see serving breakfast as one more onerous duty that they simply can't manage.

They say it's too hard to make bus and class schedules dovetail with the serving of breakfast, too difficult to bring in staff to prepare and present the meal. Yet given the fact that the federal government pays for these meals and that there are a growing number of hungry children in the state's classrooms, these minor obstacles could be removed if this problem was taken more seriously.

The second reason is more complex and even harder to swallow.

There are advocates who believe that Maine's hungry school children should be fed breakfast in school. But they say that by offering breakfast to only those eligible for free and reduced price meals, those children will be stigmatized (in contrast, everyone eats lunch, so you don't know who is getting subsidized or free meals and who is paying full cost).

So they advocate for what's called "Universal Breakfast," which is free breakfast for all kids. That way, the poor kids aren't stigmatized.

But of course, that's far too expensive. There's no money to do that, so instead of settling for part of a loaf -- subsidized breakfast for eligible children from poor families -- the idea gets dropped, and there's no breakfast at all.

IT'S TIME TO PASS A LAW

And it may very well be specious reasoning. Ask Winthrop Grade School Principal Ann Dooling if the kids at her school's breakfast (where three-quarters of them eat a free or subsidized meal) are looked down on by other school children, she looks at you quizzically and says, "The kids don't know." Dunn says simply, "I've never found that problem."

State Sen. Libby Mitchell, a Democrat from Vassalboro, is trying to plow through all the excuses and political correctness. She has introduced a bill to serve breakfast in school to all Maine's eligible children.

The details haven't been worked out yet, but it's a promising piece of legislation that deserves the support of lawmakers. Similar bills have been introduced and killed in the past, however, so it's by no means clear that the commonsense embodied in the bill (that hungry children can't learn, that the feds will pay for them to have breakfast, ergo, we should give them breakfast) will move Mitchell's colleagues to do the right thing.

Perhaps the only good thing about the just-documented alarming rise in hunger in the state is that it may convince lawmakers to finally do what they've been unwilling to do in the past.

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