Schools in Fillmore Not Yet Serving Breakfast : Nutrition: State grants are available for the program. More than half of the district’s students qualify for free or low-cost morning meals.

Seventeen months after California started offering special grants to feed school breakfasts to needy students, the Fillmore Unified School District still serves no morning meal.

And it is not for lack of need:

An average of 54% of Fillmore schoolchildren are eligible for free or reduced-price meals because their parents’ wages leave them at or near the federal poverty level.

There is no breakfast program, said Barbara Spieler, business director, because of logistical problems in making it work: bus schedules to be juggled, multipurpose rooms to be cleared and the late arrival of state paperwork.

Grant application forms arrived in Fillmore only last month, just two or three weeks before they were due back at the state Department of Education, Spieler said, and there was insufficient time to study the material.

“We decided that next year . . . we’d try to take a look at the schedules and get all the logistics straightened out,” she said.

For now, Fillmore teachers must put up with students who are fidgety or sleepy by midmorning because they have eaten no breakfast. It may hit hardest in children with medical problems such as diabetes or migraine headaches.

One teacher said she even shares her own sandwiches with the hungriest.

“I do know I have children that don’t eat breakfast. They tell me that they’re hungry,” said Jan Lee, who teaches first and second grade at Fillmore’s San Cayetano School.

“It’s hard to do your work when you haven’t had breakfast,” Lee said. “Sometimes I end up giving them part of my lunch.”

Fillmore district nurse Martha Romero was even more pointed: “They have their hard subjects in the morning, and they come to the nurse’s office complaining of headaches or stomachaches. A lot of times, kids come in with the symptoms of being hypoglycemic. If they had their last meal at 6 or 7 o’clock the night before, how can they focus?”

Romero said she sometimes lectures parents about the importance of feeding their children breakfast. And, she said, some Fillmore teachers try to inject the breakfast gospel into their regular lessons on health or nutrition.

In the lower grades, especially the kindergarten classrooms, teachers ask students to bring a snack, Romero said.

“Sometimes the kids will bring a bag of oranges or a bag of apples or bananas and share with the other kids,” she said. “I think it makes a big difference.”

By contrast, the benefits of a good breakfast can be seen at Cesar E. Chavez School, the first in the Oxnard Unified School District to offer free breakfasts.

Students no longer nod off or act up in class quite as much, teachers say.

Grades and scholastic test scores have been rising, according to the principal.

And the district nurse says 8- to 10-year-old girls have stopped coming to her office with fresh burns on their arms.

“The girls would have to heat up the beans or fry the eggs for their little brothers or sisters” after their parents left for work at dawn, nurse Linda Butcher said.

“They were trying to fix breakfasts for their families,” Butcher said. “The tortilla would spit hot grease on their arms while they were cooking. I’d see as much as a case a week.”

School officials said they are planning to extend the year-old program throughout the Oxnard district’s other schools that serve needy children.

At Oxnard’s Christa McAuliffe School, for instance, hungry students cause trouble, do poorly in class and even fall asleep at their desks, Principal Dennis Johnson said.

“You have students who are tired, irritable and cranky,” he said last week. “These inevitably are the students who could be agitated on the playground, students who are mad at someone in the corridor for bumping into them accidentally.”

Johnson said he is “hoping to see a turnaround” when his elementary school starts serving breakfast.

That will happen after district officials obtain grants from the state Department of Education to buy cafeteria equipment so they can serve free or reduced-price breakfasts at five schools: McAuliffe, Curren, Emily Ritchen and Lemonwood elementary schools and Nueva Vista alternative school.

Students miss breakfast for several reasons, officials said: Parents may lack time or money to prepare breakfast, and children themselves may sleep late or leave early without eating.

“We feel this is an important program for children,” said Pera Jambazian, district director of child nutrition services. “If they eat correctly, especially in the morning, they pay more attention in school.”

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