More Students Digesting Breakfasts Before Lessons

Shiloh Hills Elementary first-grader Amy Goins waves her tan plastic fork over her breakfast food like she is offering a blessing.

“This is apples with cinnamon, sausage, and … what do you call this?” Goins asked, jabbing at a stack of french toast. “This is healthy. This makes me not grouchy.”

Goins is onto something, say educators who advocate school-prepared breakfasts.

School breakfast programs have increased in popularity since being started five years ago in most school districts. Recent research found students test and concentrate better and have fewer absences and discipline problems if they eat a morning meal.

The programs were started after a 1991 state law was passed requiring schools to give poor students a morning boost.

But at some schools the breakfasts are catching on with more affluent parents.

At Mead’s Shiloh Hills Elementary, about one-quarter of the students eating the 85-cent breakfast are eligible for free or reduced meals.

Other parents, particularly in two-income households, choose to feed their kids at school out of convenience.

“We’re a busy household in the morning,” said Laurie Ryser, whose daughter Emily eats at school every morning. “Here it would be cereal and toast; there it’s better food.”

The breakfast program in Mead has been growing about 9 percent per year, up to about 800 meals a day. Mead Food Services Director Cathy Abbott said she has been trying to break the perception that breakfasts are served just for poor kids.

“Parents are very concerned how it looks,” said Abbott. “We are telling parents, ‘Letting your kids eat at school is OK.”’

But the programs take on more urgency at poorer schools.

Holmes and Bemiss elementaries have the highest percentage of students living under the poverty line and serve the most breakfasts in the Spokane School District.

“It gets to be a crucial thing,” said Bemiss Principal Dale McDonald. “Breakfast and lunch are the only good meals a lot of our students get a day.”

Meals are prepared according to federal nutritional guidelines. The U.S. Department of Education pays for part of the food costs.

A study by a UCLA graduate student found that students not only perform and behave better, but they also have more positive self-images when they eat in the morning.

To encourage more students to eat school breakfasts, Shiloh Hills just started letting students eat in class. The number of breakfasts tripled.

“If they aren’t thinking about their stomach, they can be thinking about learning in class,” said Principal Joan Davis.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo