Suburban schools are facing more and more low-income children every year, and have responded by opening up the breakfast buffets:
The children at Meadows Elementary School in Plano don't hide their hunger well. "The little ones will just sit at their desks and cry," principal Linda Engelking said. "The older ones sometimes will just be angry."
This year, no one should be hungry at Meadows – breakfast will be served every day, to everyone, for free. The school joins a growing number of suburban schools in the Dallas area that are seeing more children from low-income families walking through their doors. The schools have added myriad programs in response.
...It sounds simple, but educators say a full stomach can improve everything from absenteeism to behavior to learning.
Ronald E. Kleinman, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, has studied the effects of breakfast on schoolchildren for 15 years. He said the free breakfast program, known nationally as universal breakfast, offers strong rewards at a low cost.
It sounds like free breakfast is needed in Dallas, given that the percentage of "economically disadvantaged" students has nearly doubled in less than 10 years. A hot breakfast hasn't been shown to raise test scores, but it certainly can't hurt. And offering breakfast to all students does help reduce the stigma of having to accept a free meal.
Does it bother anyone else, though, that so many of Dallas's children have parents who either don't bother to feed them breakfast, or just can't be around when the kids wake up to go to school? Aren't any adults around at home when they go to school? This seems like a ominous harbinger of more than just grumbly tummies.
Posted by kswygert at July 26, 2004 02:11 PM