Growing School Breakfast, Ending Childhood Hunger
Posted by Meghann Dallin on Wednesday, December 7, 2011
I’ve seen the reality of child food insecurity in New Mexico. I am witness to households with children whose parents work hard to meet their basic needs but struggle to have enough food resources for sufficient nourishment. I see it in the summer, on weekends, and during the school year.
It’s a young boy in kindergarten toting an over-sized backpack, getting to his first class a few minutes late with a flushed concern on his face, suggesting his disappointment in missing school breakfast. But for him and his schoolmates, something has changed. His apprehension about having access to a meal to get him through the morning can be eased. His elementary school now serves Breakfast in the Classroom. Even a few minutes late, he is able to eat a nutritious breakfast with his classmates. This is the upside of what I witness — communities and organizations working together to increase children’s and families access to food resources and address child food insecurity in New Mexico.
Today, 121,000 of our households in New Mexico are at risk of hunger and more than 153,500 children 18 years and younger experience poverty. While over 104,000 of our students attending school are eligible for free and reduced price meals, only 61 percent of those students eat breakfast at school. This statistic ranks New Mexico as number one in the country for the highest student participation in the School Breakfast Program, which is great news that demonstrates the efforts school districts across the state have taken over the years to increase school breakfast access. And we can do more. We can do more to increase our children’s access to school breakfast and at the recent New Mexico School Breakfast Summit in November, food service directors, cafeteria managers, principals, students, nonprofit organizations, and others discussed how this can happen across the state.
The New Mexico No Kid Hungry Campaign, an initiative of the New Mexico Collaboration to End Hunger and Share Our Strength, sponsored the state’s first School Breakfast Summit in collaboration with Dairy Max, the state School Nutrition Association, and the Student Nutrition Bureau of the New Mexico Public Education Department. The summit organizers and participants were joined by national, regional and local presenters, including Bill Ludwig, the USDA Southwest Regional Administrator, Madeleine Levin, Senior Policy Analyst at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), Dayle Hayes, author and nutrition consultant, Courtney Smith, No Kid Hungry Program Director at Share Our Strength, and Jeremy Everett, executive director of the Texas Hunger Initiative.
The summit provided useful information about child food insecurity in our state and effective methods of expanding school breakfast from elementary through high school. Presenters talked about the root causes of food insecurity, its long-term physical, emotional, and mental health effects on children, and what communities in New Mexico can do to decrease the risk of child hunger. Many resources were provided during the summit to support schools with increasing breakfast access, including breakfast expansion toolkits and step-by-step approaches to starting alternative breakfast models K-12th grade, like Breakfast in the Classroom and Grab and Go. Angela Haney, Lyman Graham, Mary Ann McCann, and Nancy Cathey , food service directors that run successful alternative breakfast programs at their school districts in New Mexico, shared words of experience, effective breakfast program ideas, and inspiration with other food service staff.
Participants commented that they left the summit encouraged to expand breakfast in their school, to connect with and visit other districts that have long-term alternative breakfast programs, to partner with other organizations to address child food insecurity in their community. One attendee mentioned, “The timing could not have been better. I just began a “Grab and Go at the Gate” program two weeks ago. It was great to hear from practiced peers, the ups and downs, how-to’s and not-to’s.”
The summit had school districts strengthening and creating new partnerships with one another and initiatives like the New Mexico No Kid Hungry Campaign, to expand meal programs during the school day, as well as after school and the summer. Partnerships like these lead to changing the reality of child food insecurity in our state.
So, as that young kindergarten boy grows into his backpack and starts middle and high school, I want to see that he has easy and stigma-free access to school breakfast if he needs it. I want to witness that his cousins, who may go to other elementary schools, can also participate in classroom breakfast programs that ensure students to a morning meal. I want ending child hunger in our state to be realized, that all children and their families across New Mexico have sufficient access to nutritious meals in the cities, rural towns and villages, in the summer, on the weekends, and during the school year.
December 7, 2011 | 0 comment(s) | Tags: new mexico, no kid hungry, school breakfast, universal breakfast
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