State House news forward by Jeff B

Would funds be better spent by providing more food and variety for breakfast and the state do a public service mass advertising campaign. Local school districts need the funding to carry out these programs and mandates so they can use available local revenue for budget items like new school books.

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From: "Katherine Cohen (SEN)" .net
Sent: Tuesday, March 5, 2013 6:51:08 PM
Subject: FW: STATE LOOKS TO BOOST PARTICIPATION IN SCHOOL BREAKFAST PROGRAMS

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From: State House News Service
Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2013 6:27:48 PM (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
To: news@statehousenews.com
Subject: STATE LOOKS TO BOOST PARTICIPATION IN SCHOOL BREAKFAST PROGRAMS

STATE LOOKS TO BOOST PARTICIPATION IN SCHOOL BREAKFAST PROGRAMS

By Colleen Quinn
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE

STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, MARCH 5, 2013……More than half of the students who qualify for free or reduced lunch in Massachusetts public schools do not eat breakfast at school when it is available, and Massachusetts ranks 42nd in the nation for low-income student breakfast participation.

To get more students to eat breakfast at school, education and agriculture officials are offering grants and awards to districts with the hopes of increasing program participation by 35 percent over the next year.

Schools are being asked to increase the number of students who eat a morning meal at school by ramping up their promotion campaigns around breakfast availability and by enhancing menu options and delivery methods.

Individual schools will be awarded up to $4,000 in grants to boost awareness and student access to breakfast programs, through a partnership between the New England Dairy & Food Council, the Child Nutrition Outreach program at Project Bread, the School Nutrition Association of Massachusetts, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Department of Agricultural Resources.

Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester and Agricultural Commissioner Gregory Watson will kick off the Massachusetts School Breakfast Challenge Wednesday morning at the Morse School in Cambridge. The Breakfast Challenge will end in December 2014.

Nearly one in five children in the United States struggles with hunger, and teachers see it firsthand in their classrooms, according to DESE officials.

Hungry students are unable to concentrate, often have headaches and stomach aches, and perform poorly in school. Three out of five teachers across the country say they have children in their classroom who regularly come to school hungry.

“We are trying to shine a spotlight on the importance of every kid eating breakfast,” said JC Considine, a spokesman for DESE. “Kids who eat a good healthy breakfast are better prepared to learn. Kids who come into the classroom having eaten a nutritious breakfast, they focus better, they behave better. There is some data that it actually does lead to increased performance in the classroom.”

There are a handful of barriers that keep children from eating breakfast at school, according to Considine. Lack of awareness about breakfast programs plays a part, as well as time and space constraints. Some students forgo breakfast because they feel a stigma about eating at school.

Some schools have created innovative programs to make serving food in the morning easier, like grab-and-go breakfasts, or allowing students to eat in the classroom – helping to eliminate the stigma by having everyone eat together.

The federal government launched the School Breakfast Program as a pilot project in 1966, making it permanent in 1975. The program is administered at the federal level by the U. S. Department of Agriculture through its Food and Consumer Service (FCS). State education agencies and local school food authorities administer the program at the local level.

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