COLUMN ONE : Going to School Hungry : As poverty spreads, teachers often see students who have not eaten for days. Malnutrition hinders learning, but resistance to breakfast programs raises question of how far districts should go to help.

The symptoms have swept through Edgewood Middle School.

By 10 many mornings there is a long line outside the nurse’s door at the West Covina school. Some children clutch their stomachs. Others grasp their heads. In this mostly middle-class bedroom community, these children share a common ailment. They are hungry.

One boy came into Assistant Principal Amelia Esposito’s office last year and confessed to stealing food from a 7-Eleven store. “Every night I go to bed hungry,” the 13-year-old told her, bowing his head. “There isn’t enough food.”

“It’s scary how many kids here are hungry,” says Esposito, who believes one in four children comes to class undernourished.

America’s hunger is not the starvation of Somalia or Rwanda that galvanizes global attention: bloated bellies, emaciated arms, failing bodies along roadsides. Hunger here saps people in more subtle ways; families eat only once a day or skip meals for several days, causing chronic malnutrition. It is a problem that many researchers say eased markedly in the 1960s and ‘70s, but resurfaced with a vengeance in recent years.

Hunger, they say, afflicts up to 30 million Americans. Twelve million of them are children, many in recession-ravaged Southern California.

Their plight has emerged most publicly in the schools, where teachers delve into their own pockets to feed children whose ability to learn is being crippled by hunger.

Yet half of California’s schools--including all 11 in the West Covina Unified School District--do not offer one ready remedy: breakfast, a federally funded entitlement. Nationally, 37% of the 13.6 million low-income children who get a subsidized lunch also eat a morning meal at school. In some districts, breakfast has been barred or eliminated by school officials who oppose it on philosophical grounds. Many in West Covina, where Christian conservatives dominate the school board, oppose feeding children breakfast at school, calling it anti-family and a usurpation of what should be a parent’s responsibility.

“I want kids to eat at home with their families,” said school board President Mike Spence. “Breakfast at school is just one more thing school districts do rather than allowing parents to take care of their children.”

A suburb that blossomed from orange groves in the San Gabriel Valley after World War II, West Covina, the “City of Beautiful Homes,” is an unlikely haven for hunger. In the 1980s, however, teachers watched as lost jobs, an influx of newcomers from the inner city and an increase in single mothers left many students living hand-to-mouth. Although the median family income in West Covina is $51,000, there are pockets of poverty: one in four single mothers lives on less than $14,800 a year.

Although the shifts in West Covina are hardly unique, the town’s emerging economic stratification has made hunger highly visible in the schools.

The number of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches at Edgewood, the district’s only middle school, has surged to nearly two-thirds from one-third a decade ago.

Among them is Cristina Yepez, a soft-spoken 12-year-old with freckles and wide-set blue eyes, who spends some mornings at the school health office complaining of stomachaches. Last year, she says, she got dizzy on the playground, crumpling onto the blacktop at Merced Elementary. She had had no breakfast that day. Dinner the night before was a potato.

“A lot of times, we have just bread,” says Cristina, gently combing the silky red hair on her Little Mermaid doll as her family prepares for an evening’s meal. “Sometimes, I get really hungry. But there’s nothing more to eat. I go to my friend’s house and pretend to play and say: ‘Oh, can I have something to drink?’ ”

Cristina sits down with her mother, Darlene, and sister, Jesseca, 13, for dinner. It is their only meal today. One hot dog each, and water. Darlene Yepez, 38, who is divorced, was sidelined from a forklift job by a back injury but is searching for work. Meanwhile, the family survives on $607 in welfare and $130 in food stamps, which run out halfway through the month. Swallowing her pride, the mother has gone to West Covina’s food pantry--but has used her five allowed visits. A few times, the girls have gone up to three days without food, she says, quietly beginning to sob. The last two weeks, she says, they have had one meal a day.

Studies show that hungry students are fatigued. They cannot concentrate. They do worse than their peers on standardized tests. Because they are ill twice as often, they miss class more frequently.

“They are dazed. You can see it in their eyes. Sometimes, their hands tremble,” says Edgewood teacher Kim Breen, who estimates that three-quarters of her students arrive without eating breakfast. Some do not have the energy to raise their heads from their desks. One girl broke down last year in class, her hands shaking, describing how she had gone all weekend without eating.

Kathi Jennings sees hunger’s toll daily at Edgewood, which has about 1,800 students. Knowing many of them are undernourished, she keeps a choice of rewards for daily tasks on her desk: a baseball card, a small toy or a cup of applesauce. Many kids choose food.

Two guards who patrol Edgewood’s playground say one 13-year-old girl chases their green security cart, asking for food. Physical education teacher Barbara Davids says she sometimes fed a 12-year-old boy who volunteered to help custodians pick up after lunch so he could salvage garbage scraps.

Another student got in trouble regularly so he could be sent to the assistant principal’s office, where a jar of diabetic candies is perched on her desk. “I’m so hungry. I’m so hungry,” sobbed the 12-year-old boy, dipping his hand into the jar and stuffing six candies into his mouth.

Hunger plagues many U.S. schools. More than a quarter of elementary schoolchildren come to class without breakfast, said Doris Derelian, president of the American Dietetic Assn.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, like many urban areas, has long served breakfasts so the problem on those campuses is less pronounced.

Rural and suburban districts are less likely to serve a morning meal. In the Baldwin Park Unified District, nearly half of 16,000 visits to the school nurse last year were tied to hunger. Since then, the district has started offering breakfast at many of its schools.

The mounting toll in schools mirrors a resurgence in hunger, which studies show was brought under control in the ‘70s but grew by 50% between 1985 and 1991. Even for Americans with jobs, a growing percentage--now nearly one in five--work full time but earn less than the poverty level.

Divorce and out-of-wedlock births left children, along with their mothers, the nation’s biggest losers. More than one in five children live in poverty, and almost a quarter of low-income children in the United States are anemic--a condition linked to inadequate or poor nutrition. Government cuts have not helped: median Aid to Families With Dependent Children benefits for a family of three have dropped 47% since 1970. California food stamp payments average 70 cents a meal, slightly more than half of what the U.S. Department of Agriculture says it takes to get an adequate diet.

In an effort to assess the extent of hunger in America, the federal government has launched its first tally on malnutrition. Results from the survey of 60,000 households are expected to be released in 1996.

Recent academic research already has focused on the effects of hunger in the classroom. A 1993 Tufts University study said hunger is stunting cognitive development as lethargic children disengage from learning, and warned that “our country may be heading for a crisis of enormous proportions.”

“Health and nutrition are powerful determinants of educational competence,” says Ernesto Pollitt, a UC Davis human development professor. His 1993 study found that anemic and iron-deficient toddlers lag behind their peers in mental development by up to 25%. Nonetheless, Pollitt said he is surprised to find that many schools do not serve breakfast and ignore the effects of hunger on the ability to learn.

A study of 1,023 public schoolchildren in Lawrence, Mass., found that when schools started to serve breakfast, students’ standardized test scores rose, and absenteeism and tardiness declined. Math, another study shows, is hardest hit when children are not given a morning meal.

“Scientific evidence shows that if you don’t do this, you are undermining the very reason for your existence, which is to educate children,” says J. Larry Brown, director of the Tufts University Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition Policy.

At Edgewood school, mid-morning is the worst, said science teacher Breen. “How many eat three meals a day? Two? One?” Breen asks her class. Most say they eat twice, some only once. It is her annual informal body count on hunger, and the results are more grim each year. Breen estimates a sixth of her students are hungry regularly.

“I have to repeat instructions two or three times,” she says. “I try to teach them physics, but I can’t.” By second period, a boy in the third row drops his head to his desk. “I just leave them alone. They aren’t going to get it,” Breen says, her voice full of frustration.

Just before lunch, a 14-year-old girl rises from her desk and slowly approaches her teacher. She says she has not eaten in two days. Earlier, on the playground, she nearly fainted, dizzy from lack of food. “Could I have 50 cents?” she says quietly so the other children can’t overhear. “I’m hungry.” Breen--who often gets requests for food--fishes out four quarters. The girl, who has not yet been issued a card that will allow her to get a free lunch, still lacks enough money to buy one. She eats what she can: a bag of Doritos from the school vending machine.

“I keep my own stuff,” says the school health clerk, Deborah Paschal, swinging open the office cabinet. Sandwiched between the Band-Aids and medicines are peanut butter, crackers and boxes of juice, all purchased with her own money. Counselor Pamela Clausen sometimes gives away her sack lunch. Physical education teacher Barbara Davids occasionally brings in grocery bags of food. When she runs out, or does not have money, she sends children to the cafeteria with a note: “Feed this kid.”

Throughout Southern California, teachers like Ernie Sanchez are picking up the slack. When he was a second-grade teacher at Vejar Elementary School in Pomona, Sanchez spent the first period each morning making cheese sandwiches for every student. If he had no cheese, he scooped a cup of cereal into a napkin on each child’s desk. Once, he brought apples to the school, where 99% of the children qualify for free or reduced-price meals. “All these little hands reached out toward me,” says Sanchez, who--faced with the crush of children--struggled to regain control of his class. “I’ll take that image to my grave. I didn’t think I would ever see that in America.”

“It has gotten worse,” says Debbie Norman, a fourth-grade teacher at East Whittier’s Evergreen Elementary. She worries that math and English, taught first thing in the morning, are most jeopardized. “I have parents tell me: ‘I just don’t have enough to feed them.’ The kids say: ‘There is nothing in the house.’ ”

Her colleague, kindergarten teacher Linda Palmer, could no longer endure the procession of hungry 5-year-olds to her desk. Palmer now passes out crackers and popcorn to children who come to class without snacks.

Some hungry children come from neglectful or drug-plagued homes. At Edgewood, Assistant Principal Esposito puts the number at one in 10.

“We don’t have food sometimes,” says one 13-year-old Edgewood student, nervously adjusting her glasses. Asked what her mother does, the girl said, “She stays in the house and watches TV every day.” Her father? “He takes drugs. That’s why my mom threw him out.”

But most, Esposito says, suffer because their parents have been laid off, work long hours and leave their children to fend for themselves in the mornings, or work at jobs that barely cover the rent.

Lisa Drynan, 32, was recently laid off from her administrative job at an engineering firm, the second position she’s lost to “downsizing” in three years. She is again searching for work. Drynan has gone up to two days at a time without food. Her three boys, Kevin, 3, Kenny, 9 and Keith, 11, who attends Edgewood, often eat once or twice a day. The night before, says Drynan, staring inside her bare refrigerator, her three sons split two hot dogs.

“There are many days I don’t have anything for them for breakfast,” she says in her tidy apartment, where the toys are lined up outside the front door. Even though she buys generic brand foods, her $102 in food stamps each month run out after 2 1/2 weeks. Drynan, who is divorced, has used up her five trips to the West Covina food bank. “I know food is important. But I know we need a roof over our heads more,” she says, adding that most of her income goes to the $690-a-month rent, bills and collection agencies to pay off thousands of dollars in medical costs owed from one son’s head injury.

“I’m hungry,” says Kevin, tugging at his mother’s white T-shirt. Drynan has heard that her 3-year-old ventures to neighbors’ homes, asking for food. She pulls out a Popsicle--the last bit of food in her freezer--and gives it to Kevin, who consumes the treat in seconds.

Kenny, a skinny boy with big brown eyes, laments not having had his favorite food, pork chops, since his birthday in March. At school, he says, “in the mornings, I get real hungry.” By 10:30, he begins a daily lunchtime countdown, eyes focused on the classroom clock. Other children sit down after morning recess for snack time--a treat from home. “They read us a story, or we do our work. I just have to work. I don’t have a snack,” Kenny says quietly. “I get hungry when I look at them.”

Drynan knows hunger afflicts other families in her neighborhood, even those in which the parents have jobs. When Drynan sent her children for a sleep-over to Susie Ballard’s house across the street, they were told to eat supper at their own home, then come over.

Ballard, 38, whose daughter Kristin attends Edgewood, explains that although she works, she cannot put three meals on the table for her own three children, much less visitors. Ballard, whose marriage broke up two years ago, lost her longtime job as a pizza company training manager. Work as a cleaning lady barely covers the rent. Half the month, there is no breakfast. Ballard stretches a pack of spaghetti into three meals, thinning down the red sauce with cans of water.

“There are nights I tell the kids: ‘I’m not hungry. You eat,’ ” says Ballard, nervously smoothing the lace doily on the apartment’s living room table. She gives the kids Kool-Aid to fill their bellies. Fresh fruit, vegetables and coffee are luxuries of the past.

“I tell them: ‘If someone offers you a free meal, take it, take it.’ I used to go to bed crying every night. I feel a failure to them. I ask: How can they look up to me?”

Kristin, 13, is curled up in a chair in the corner of the sparsely furnished but immaculate apartment. “If the food was there, I would eat more,” she says shyly.

Anti-hunger advocates are waging a coordinated, nationwide campaign in a school-to-school battle to get the tens of thousands of schools without breakfast programs to sign up. Without breakfast in schools, the $16 billion California spends on elementary and high school education may be wasted money, Assemblywoman Gwen Moore warned in a January letter to colleagues, prodding them to push the program in their districts. Twenty-one states--including New York and Texas--now mandate that all or some of their schools serve breakfast. Bills to make breakfast mandatory in California schools have failed, partly because they are viewed by some legislators as coddling immigrant children.

In La Habra, a recently implemented breakfast program has made teaching more productive. Morning stomachaches used to afflict half her students daily, said Maria Vigil, a Las Lomas Elementary kindergarten teacher. “They were all nauseous” and lethargic, she said. Her office brimming with more than a dozen hungry children by midmorning, Las Lomas Principal Mary Jo Anderson found that for 10% of the students, school lunch was their only solid meal. “If their tummies hurt, their brains can’t work,” Anderson says. School breakfast, she adds, resulted in a 95% drop in disciplinary problems. “They are calm, happy. They aren’t angry. They aren’t hurting. It’s like a miracle.”

“Teacher! I am going to eat!” children yell at Vigil as they spill out of yellow school buses. Sandra Andrade, 5, races from the parking lot, grabs her green meal ticket, then rushes to the wire screen window, waiting impatiently for her tray of milk, juice, cereal and string cheese. Unemployed father Roberto Andrade--who some days can’t scrounge up the gas money to search for work--hovers over the school breakfast tables, where four of his children who attend Las Lomas share their food with his other three younger children. “Without this, they might not eat some days,” says the handyman. Three-year-old Eduardo devours a packet of graham crackers with his sister Sandra.

The focus on food is everywhere. As soon as class starts in Vigil’s Room 6, she notices that 6-year-old Jonathan Quintana is irritable and crying. Vigil’s hand dives into a desk drawer and pulls out a bag of crackers: “Let’s get you a little cereal, OK?”

Jonathan is ushered to a table, seated next to his teddy bear, and given cereal, juice, milk and more crackers. The lesson quickly continues. Jonathan’s sobs become more infrequent. He sniffles. By 9, he is seated with the other students, at work on lessons about the calendar and the weather.

As Vigil offers each child an animal cracker from a large jar, Jonathan cheerfully plays with Legos. Even as lunchtime approaches, children attentively listen to Vigil’s rendition of “The Three Bears,” jostling to see the book’s pictures. Later, Alberto Cueva, 5, savors his lunch--a burrito, followed by corn and milk--before his half day of school ends.

“Sometimes, we eat at night,” says the boy, urgently shoveling the burrito into his tiny mouth. “Sometimes we don’t.”

About This Series

In this series, The Times examines four battlegrounds in the war on hunger in Southern California.

* Today: Hungry children, caught in the battles over school breakfast.

* Monday: The growing salvage food industry--spawned by hard times--takes a bite out of charitable food banks.

* Tuesday: U.S. Department of Agriculture changes course and launches a crusade to attract more people to food stamps.

* Wednesday: A one-woman crusade to ease neighborhood hunger, one family at a time.

What’s for Breakfast?

School breakfasts can be hot or cold, and vary from the favorite--cereal, milk and juice--to breakfast burritos or breakfast pizzas. Some schools serve breakfast before class, others as a nutrition break, or even on the school bus. In California, almost 5,000 schools offer breakfasts to more than 600,000 students every school day. Here’s a look at some typical costs and numbers:

Typical School Menu

8 oz. of milk

4 oz. of juice

Fresh or canned fruit

Hash-brown potato wedge

Cinnamon roll or bagel with cream cheese, apple turnover, fruit-filled pancake, sausage biscuits, burritos.

What Does It Cost?

Because of reimbursements from federal and state governments, school breakfast programs typically don’t cost a school anything. In fiscal 1993, those reimbursements included $835 million from the federal government to the states. Here are some of the federal reimbursement rates per meal for 1994-95:

Severe Need Other Amount Schools Schools Child Pays Free lunch $1.16 98 cents 0 Reduced-priced lunch 86 cents 68 cents 30 cents (maximum) Full-price lunch 19 cents 19 cents 54 cents (average in U.S.)

Who Is Eligible?

For a free breakfast: Children from a family of four with annual income of $19,240 or less.

For a reduced-priced breakfast: Children from a family of four with annual income of $27,380 or less.

Who Gets Breakfast?

The percentage of eligible children receiving subsidized breakfast and lunch at school is higher in Los Angeles County than the nationwide average, but it is lower in other Southern California counties:

U.S.: 37%

California: 36.5%

Los Angeles County: 41%

Orange County: 20.2%

Ventura County: 15%

San Bernardino County: 15.7%

Riverside County: 20.8%

San Diego County: 24.4%

Assessing Hunger

Generally, researchers and the federal government measure hunger by asking people questions about how often they skip meals, cut the size of meals, or send their children to bed hungry due to lack of resources.

30 million Americans--including 12 million children--fit this category.

USDA looks at what percentage of children eat the government’s recommended dietary allowance, which measures calories as well as a range of vitamins.

In 1985, 63.7% of children living below the poverty level consumed an inadequate amount of calories.

Hunger can occur without manifesting itself in clinical symptoms, but in the worst cases it can be measured by testing for anemia or growth stunting in children.

In 1993, 18.6% of low-income children were anemic; 8.4% had stunted growth.

Sources: California and U.S. data is for 1993-94 school year, from Food Research and Action Center; California county data from California Department of Education, 1992-93 data; Child Nutrition Division, USDA

The Effects of Hunger

In a survey on health and school absenteeism, children’s hunger affected these characterists:

Hungry Non-hungry Unwanted weight loss 14% 4.6% Fatigue, irritability, inability to concentrate 45% 20% dizziness, frequent headaches Frequent ear infections, frequent colds. 62% 42%