U.S. Program Targets Hunger in Burbank : Services: Low-income children are fed during summer vacation, illustrating the spread of poverty to suburbs.

They probably didn’t have places like Burbank in mind when they designed it.

But 25 years after Congress created the Summer Food Service Program for low-income kids, the city of Burbank is serving the meals for the first time.

It is a vivid illustration of the changing face of poverty in Southern California and the nation, anti-hunger advocates say.

Born during the era of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, the summer food program faces new challenges. In Los Angeles County, program workers have to deal with year-round school calendars and the increasing demand for the program far from the inner city, including rural areas and suburban communities such as Burbank and parts of Orange County.

“In one word: It’s the economy,” said Cleophus Davis, statewide director of the Department of Agriculture summer program. “People who previously had jobs, don’t have the jobs. They don’t have the money. It gets down to economics.”

Nationwide, an average 1.9 million children a day participated in the program in 1992, up from 1.57 million in 1988 and only 99,000 in 1969. In California, the program served a daily average of 122,000 kids. But supporters say that millions more children need the meals, and not all of them live in the inner city.

“In general, it started as an inner-city program in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, but there’s a growing awareness of the program’s availability and more efforts to find pockets of poverty in otherwise affluent areas, such as Burbank,” said Ed Morawetz, food program specialist with the USDA office in Washington, D. C.

The summer food program was created to ensure that low-income children would get at least one nutritious meal a day, even when the National School Lunch Program, which offered free and reduced-price meals during the school year, was not operating, said Dee Amaden, spokeswoman for the USDA in California.

The program was designed for “areas with high poverty rates or areas with large numbers of working mothers,” Amaden said.

According to a study by the Food Research Action Center in Washington, about 5 million children under 12 go hungry at some point each month. For them, the free school lunches are a necessity, not a luxury.

“We have reports from teachers who say that on a Monday morning, kids will attack their breakfast or lunch as if it’s the first meal they’ve had since Friday,” said Christin Driscoll, a FRAC spokeswoman. “Imagine when that Monday morning is three months away.”

At Miller Park in Burbank one recent day, 9-year-old Justin dutifully guarded his spot near the picnic benches where a crowd of youngsters waited in line. It was 12:15 p.m. and lunch wouldn’t be served until 12:30, but Justin was hungry--and chivalry was dead.

“Cindy, she’s cutting!” he yelled frantically across the park, pointing out the culprit--a little girl with a mischievous smile--to site supervisor Cindy Dyer. “This girl right here, she’s cutting!”

When 12:30 rolled around, Justin was the first in line. Mothers came with their children or children came alone. One by one they grabbed a brown bag and a carton of chocolate milk and staked out spots at picnic tables or beneath a shade tree.

“It was good,” Justin declared, after finishing a bologna sandwich, celery sticks, a banana and chocolate milk.

Dyer, a former teacher who has worked with the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation for seven years, said participation in the park’s recreation program--which offers games, crafts and field trips--has increased because of the meals.

“A lot of people come just for lunch,” Dyer said. “Last year at this time we’d have 10 to 15 kids regularly. Because of the lunch program we have 30 to 40 regularly.”

The site serves 100 meals a day on average.

Although designated for low-income families, there is little stigma attached to the program, Dyer said. Many of the kids know each other from the neighborhood, and because Miller Park qualifies as a so-called “open site,” anyone under 18 can get a meal. There are no tickets to hand in or forms to fill out.

Burbank city officials decided to offer the meals at three parks in early July after “we were alerted that there were that many needy children,” said Teri Stein of the city’s parks department, the sponsoring agency for the program in Burbank. The other sites besides Miller are McKinley Elementary School and Pacific Park.

The program’s spread to middle-class suburban areas does not surprise those who work in food pantries and shelters. “We have a public perception of the face of poverty, that it’s a problem of urban blight, but people are poor all over,” said Driscoll of the food research center.

A few years ago officials in Orange County learned that in spite of the county’s relative affluence more than a quarter of parents surveyed said their children went to bed hungry.

“Generally over the last several years, there’s been an increase in people needing food assistance, particularly like the summer food program,” said Carolyn Olney, associate director of the Southern California Interfaith Hunger Coalition.

Three years ago, there were no sponsors of the summer food service program in Orange County, Davis said. This summer there were 15 sponsors, including the Garden Grove Unified School District and the city of Moreno Valley. The Buena Park School District entered the program for the first time this year.

There are numerous sites throughout the San Fernando Valley, in communities such as Reseda, Canoga Park, Sunland and Sylmar. Sponsors offer meals throughout Riverside and San Bernardino counties, including one in Barstow and one operated by the Fort Mojave Indian tribe.

“We’re finding more and more communities that thought that they had no need for the program now finding out that they do,” said Mike Haga, senior field organizer for the food research center.

But over the years, participation in the program has risen and fallen in sync with the economy, the mood of the White House and the willingness of local sponsors to administer it.

Typically the summer program is sponsored by schools, park and recreation agencies or nonprofit community organizations, often in conjunction with a summer recreation or education program for kids, Amaden said.

To be eligible for designation as an open site--the most common type of sponsorship--a site must be located in areas where 50% or more of the children live in families with incomes at or below the poverty level, Davis said. Youngsters under the age of 18 and anyone who is disabled are automatically eligible to receive meals.

Although the program is growing, some believe extensive paperwork, rules that make it difficult for private nonprofit agencies to participate and a lack of awareness of the program discourage potential sponsors.

Only about 15.5% of those children who receive free or reduced meals through the school lunch program also are fed in the summer program, which means that millions who qualify for the free meals do not receive them.

“It’s a very important program, but also the most underutilized food resource program in California and in the nation,” said Zy Weinberg, project director of the California-Nevada Community Action Assn., an association of public and private nonprofit organizations that aid low-income people.

Those who fight hunger and poverty across the country want the program modified and expanded. Earlier this year, FRAC began a campaign to increase awareness of the program and encourage school districts, nonprofit organizations and other sponsors to offer it. Other anti-hunger organizations have done the same at the local level.

Kenneth Hecht, co-director of California Food Policy Advocates, an anti-hunger organization, said low-income and working-poor families in California especially need such programs because housing costs are much higher here than most of the rest of the nation and the state has relatively little public housing.

“For low-income families and middle-income families, almost all of their money goes toward rent, which they’ve got to pay,” Hecht said. “That means there’s very little left over for food, and by the end of the month people have run out.”

Before 1981, a site could qualify if a third of neighborhood youth were low income, but that was changed to 50% under the Reagan Administration. FRAC has proposed lowering the eligibility requirement from 50% to 40%, which would probably increase the number of suburban communities offering the program.

“Those are precisely the communities you will see able to have programs,” said Mike Haga of FRAC, “communities where the pockets of poverty are not as intense as they are in the inner city.”

FRAC is also recommending changes that would loosen restrictions placed on nonprofit organizations.

The USDA has no official position on the FRAC proposal and other suggested changes. The program is up for reauthorization next year and congressional hearings are under way, Morawetz said.

As anti-hunger advocates work to have the program expanded, the USDA office in California is searching for ways to solve its own problem. With the advent of year-round school, USDA officials are struggling to find sponsors who are willing to offer the summer program to kids during their breaks, which could occur in October and April as well as during the summer.

“While we’re not going to be able to cure the recession or replace all these lost jobs, programs can provide a safety net for food and nutrition for children in California and across the nation,” said Olney of the Interfaith Hunger Coalition. “That then gives those kids a chance.”