Free breakfast at schools

[SueC]

This is a debate I've been having with a friend of mine, so I thought I'd bring it here to see what others think.
Our kids go to a school which statistically I believe is made up of over 70% low-income children. The entire district is non-accredited due to the inability to raise test scores on the MAP test (might be state-wide, not sure since my kindergartner isn't taking it yet).
Every morning, all of the children, regardless of whether or not they need it, are taken to the cafeteria for free breakfast.
My friend's view point: since her child doesn't need free breakfast it is a waste of tax dollars.
My view point: Yes, my kid doesn't need it, but I think it is a good use of taxpayer dollars, since it might give the kids from a lower income bracket a greater chance at academic success. Since it would be mean and discriminatory to take only the "poor kids" down for breakfast, it just makes sense to take all the kids down to breakfast. Plus, it would require extra staff if they were to divvy the class up and only take the kids down who needed breakfast.
What do you guys think?

[Rapunzel]

Why is breakfast being served after school starts? In order to avoid both waste (your friend is correct on that point) AND needless humiliation (you're right on that point as well) the answer is to have breakfast well before school begins. So, if the school day begins at 8am then breakfast should be served at 7:30am or something like that.

Besides, if you have breakfast after a certain time of day you start running into lunchtime.

[fluffhead]

Most districts with over a certain percentage of F&RP (free and reduced pay school lunch) eligible kids will just give make breakfast available free to everybody - it's pretty cheap and they just figure it's easier that way.
So when I was working in this field, we (my organization) was pushing the state to provide 100% free breakfast for all children in the state, with an eye to getting the USDA to buy into universal free breakfast. I was asked to do the analysis showing whether kids eating school breakfast had better nutrition overall (well the idea was to show that kids eating school breakfast HAD better nutrition overall). (It had already been shown that kids skipping breakfast had poor academic performance)
My analysis did not support the desired outcome - I found that although school breakfast was definitely socioeconomically dependent, there was no evidence to say that kids eating breakfast at school had a better breakfast than the general population.
I wrote up a big report with graphs and maps and nice colors.
The report was never released. (I guess our funders would not have looked kindly on it)
Democrats can quash good research just as well as Republicans, I guess.
Anyway, it left a bitter taste in my mouth for non-profit-do-gooder research in general.

[Meenah]

Sue,
I don't have kids in school anymore but I agree with you, better to just give them all breakfast and attempt to avoid sterotyping at such an early age.
Luanne

[SueC]

Serving breakfast earlier opens up a whole additional can of worms. The majority of the kids attend before school care or arrive at school by bus. At a school going from K-8, I would say probably less than 10% of the kids are brought to school by their parents. I think elementary school in urban areas in this day and age is much different than what most of us probably grew up with. Nobody is within walking distance (and if they were they'd probably get hit by a car or mugged since this isn't the best area of town). If the mission really and truly is to serve breakfast to kids who otherwise aren't going to get it, you'd have to bus certain kids to school earlier, or still separate the kids within before school care based on who is eligible for free breakfast. So what I'm getting is that most of you think serving breakfast to kids is a valid way to spend tax dollars? What if logistically the only way to do it is to serve it to everybody (which I believe is the case in our school)--is it still valid if some kids who don't need it are getting it anyway?

[SueC]

Fluffhead, your study sounds interesting. I do admit after having gone down to the cafeteria for breakfast with the kids on a few occasions (I paid for my own breakfast btw), that the nutritional value of what they were serving wasn't fantastic. They served milk or juice with a pretty starch breakfast item. Not as nutritious of eggs, fruit, etc., but I suppose better than the alternative of no breakfast at all.

[Rapunzel]

So, you're saying that the school is babysitting the vast majority of the students well before the school day even begins?

Yup, that does open up a whole other can of worms....

What does the school do with all of these children before the school day officially begins? Arts and crafts? Recess?

It seems the solution is to have the kids who need breakfast report to the cafeteria and the kids who don't can go to their regularly scheduled whatever. Obviously if most of the kids are showing up for babysitting of some sort before school then they must have adults of some sort watching them all (I would hope ) in which case you apportion the appropriate numbers of adults to the cafeteria and other stations.

If kids go directly to their before-school babysitting or breakfast then they don't have a stigma - they're all then getting to class at the same time and if they're reporting directly to the cafeteria or another location who's going to know (unless a child receiving a free meal chooses to tell others about it)? I don't see anything wrong with that.

It continues to amaze me how parents are farming out more and more of their parenting to, of all things, the government.

[DCJenn]

Well, when you and your husband are catching the bus at 5am to get to your minimum wage income job or you're cathcing the bus as your spouse gets in for working the graveyard shift, or for whatever reason, you have no spouse...

What else are you supposed to do- you can't stay at home and raise your kids because then you're a welfare whore...you can't go to college because you need to work to pay the rent/utilities/clothing/etc.

Where exactly do you put your kids during the day?

You know, when I worked at the homeless shelter, 90% of the families there had high school degrees. I had people with Master's degrees in fact. Poverty, illness, drugs, domestic violence, disability- they can all impact a person's ability to provide for their family. Who else can you turn to to help? The school system. Is it ideal? No. But- yes, some breakfast is better than none at all, and better to feed everyone than single out some.

Jenn

[Rapunzel]

The wildly inefficient beauracratic government is hardly the best solution for raising a child. I can think of a lot of better solutions - but they require a complete overhaul in our culture and current bloated government organizations.

My father and my husband were both homeless for timeperiods during their childhood - this is an issue I'm somewhat intimate with. And, for both of them turning to the school system would've been an awful idea. It's not the best idea - although I'll admit that it has become the easiest possibility.

[DCJenn]

So, assuming that you don't have an extensive network of friends/family/fellow church people- what do you do? I mean in all seriousness- I'm not saying don't take care of your kids- I think the vast majority of people do try to do the best that they can- but even given the fact that the schools in many large cities aren't that great (and I include the charters given the experiences of Baltimore and DC with some of them...) and you HAVE to work-

Cheerios and a glass of OJ is way better than nothing at all. and toss in a free lunch and the child is significantly better off than having not gone to school in the first place. even if the ONLY educational experience they got was how to open a milk carton, it's food, and developing brains need calories. Bottom line. Free food in the school system seems to be one of those issues that there really shouldn't be much of a debate about. Feed the kids, or you'll never be able to teach them in the first place. Hungry kids don't learn.

What we need in this country is a better way to care for kids of all income levels, but we need to start with the poorest ones first.

Jenn

[mommax3]

Back to the original question.....I would much rather my tax dollars be spent feeding kids who are hungry than some of the other things they are being used for......

The school I taught in before I had kids offered free breakfast also. It took place before the actual school day began, but I had some special ed kids first period whose bus arrival made it impossible to get to the cafeteria before school started, so they often ate breakfast in my class (music) and it was no big deal. The school was a middle school, so most of the kids were old enough and savvy enough to get to the cafeteria ASAP and eat quickly, even if they arrived via bus. With elementary kids, that would be a big problem.

I think better safe than sorry on this one.....so maybe there are some kids who are eating two breakfasts.....but there are a lot MORE kids who are getting their ONLY breakfast (and may be in bad enough situations at home that they don't even realize there is such a thing as a regular morning meal until they start school) and are better equipped to learn that day as a result. Not a waste, IMO.

There is reality and then there is what the world would be if everyone had the resources (not financial....I mean emotional, intellectual, mental, physical) to live according to the standards you and I choose. Sadly, we only get to choose those standards for ourselves, and we CANNOT turn our backs on children and families who don't have the same resources and can't (or won't) make the same choices.

Sally

[SueC]

There are so many broken systems at play here (as jlorene eluded to) that unless somebody wants to do a complete overhaul then I don't see what other options there are. I don't know many of the situations of the kids in my daughter's class, however I do know of one case that illustrates why this sort of thing is important. A single mother (father is dead, I don't know why) works full-time and also goes to school. She is desperately trying to uplift her family, but in the meantime, she is relying on before and after school care for her son. My neighbor oversees the before and after school care for our district and from what I can tell, he runs a tight ship and has a pretty good program. Granted, those kids would be better off sleeping later, being fed and taken to school by mom or dad, and having a shorter day in the actual school building, but not everybody has the same choices in life that I have.
I am more encouraged that the parents need before or after school care because they are employed then if they were relying on the system to support them. The more I meet some of these parents through class parties, field trips, etc. (I don't get to meet some of them ever because they are working) I see parents who really do care, are trying their best to give their kids a good start in life, and aren't just expecting the school and taxpayer dollars to provide for their kids.

[Vanquisher]

I agree with Jenn DC and Sally. The fact is that a lot of these kids parents might not be doing all they can for their kids, but should that punish young, innocent children?

I think the breakfast program is a good thing.

We happen to be an a place to afford breakfast, but there have been times that we could not afford certain things. We always made sure we had food, and that's one of the reasons we have such high credit card debt. We knew we could pay it off one day, and it was more important for our kids to have food than the interest we would have to pay in the future. A lot of people don't have this luxury. Further, we were thousands of miles from family and had no church. What then?

Sorry, I don't believe that family and churches can provide the blanket coverage of necessities that the government can, and I believe public schools are a good way to do that.

We have a breakfast program at our school. It is optional. It goes from 7:30 - 8:00. All kids can arrive at the school at 7:30. Children who have free breakfast will not have to pay on their swipe cards. My son has occasionally paid for breakfast on mornings when he was feeling exceptionally hungry and needed a second breakfast. I am fine with this. If he doesn't go to breakfast, he can do work in his classroom. There are adults in all parts of the school to monitor the kids.

I think this is a good solution. When he was in pre-K, they got free breakfast everyday for all the kids. It was a low-income pre-K, and this was an excellent part of the program.

I will happily pay taxes for kids to get breakfast.

[mommax3]

Just a note, fwiw......the free breakfast (and lunch) is provided by federal dollars that can ONLY be used for that program.....the school could not choose to use that money in any other way.

Sally

[Gwendolyn]

I am having a hard time seeing feeding children as irresponsible tax spending.