More Schools in State Move to Offer Students Breakfast : Hunger: In three weeks, 33 campuses joined program for needy pupils. But possible budget cuts threaten effort.

In the jargon of advocates against hunger, they are called “should but don’t” schools--institutions with large proportions of poor students that do not offer a government-subsidized breakfast on campus.

Nearly 200 such schools dot the Southern California landscape--from Downey to Escondido, Oxnard to Ontario, Garden Grove to Big Bear.

In the past three weeks, 33 of them have joined a statewide rush to apply for the breakfast program, administered by the California Department of Education with mostly federal funds. Eight of the applicants--the largest number from a single district--are schools from the West Covina Unified School District, whose Edgewood Middle School was profiled in a recent Times series on hunger. West Covina’s school board is expected to make a final decision Tuesday on whether to start serving breakfast.

Statewide, 60 schools have applied for the program since late November. Dozens more report that they plan to apply in the near future to offer school breakfast--which many see as a way to counter hunger-induced learning problems.

There usually is a surge in start-up applications right before the year-end filing deadline, but this year, the volume was surprisingly heavy, said Albert Tweltridge, assistant director of child nutrition programs at the state Education Department.

For many of the most recent applicants, he said, news of hungry schoolchildren in suburbia was a wake-up call, increasing school officials’ awareness that undernourished students are tired, miss class more often and do worse than their peers on standardized tests.

At schools that balk at providing breakfast, officials offer a number of reasons: logistic concerns, bureaucratic inertia, philosophical objections to offering a morning meal to children who school officials believe should be eating breakfast at home.

Another bigger hurdle looms on the horizon: the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has pledged to quickly enact a provision in its “contract with America” that would eliminate federal funding for school nutrition programs that have traditionally enjoyed broad bipartisan support. The move would turn responsibility for the programs over to the states and cut funding in fiscal 1996, with further reductions in subsequent years.

“It is likely that throughout the country, there will be significantly fewer schools participating in the national school lunch and breakfast program if this passes,” Tweltridge said. Food service administrators and anti-hunger advocates are convening an emergency meeting Dec. 20 in Los Angeles to draft a strategy to combat the possible changes.

Any school can offer a subsidized breakfast program. As it stands now, the government offers a special incentive--a higher reimbursement rate--to “severe need” schools, those with 40% or more low-income children.

In California, education officials have renewed a school-to-school battle to get more districts to offer breakfast. An eight-page primer, “Better Breakfast, Better Learning,” currently being mailed to superintendents by the state Education Department, urges teachers, administrators and parents to start the program.

And California Food Policy Advocates, a nonprofit group, is saturating community leaders in high-need districts with its “School Breakfast Action Kit,” a step-by-step organizing guide on how to prod their schools to feed children breakfast in the cafeteria, the classroom, even on the school bus. The aim: to get 300 schools--many in Southern California--on board by June.

The following is a county-by-county look at how individual districts in Southern California are handling the breakfast issue at their neediest schools:

LOS ANGELES COUNTY / No Breakfast Option For Many in Need

Like many urban districts, Los Angeles Unified has long fed breakfast at all of its schools. But 12 districts in Los Angeles County--including Cerritos-based ABC Unified, Culver City Unified on the Westside and Pomona Unified in the San Gabriel Valley--have at least one school with a high ratio of low-income children who qualify for a free or reduced-price breakfast, but can’t get it because it isn’t offered.

Despite breakfast requests for years from principals and parents, no East Whittier City school offers the program, says food service director Long Chen. “We want to be cautious about every aspect of this,” Chen said. She points to the district’s small kitchen capacity and financial concerns. What’s more, Chen contends, there aren’t hungry children in East Whittier schools.

But Debbie Norman, a teacher at East Whittier’s Evergreen Elementary, estimates half of her students are hungry. Norman stocks graham crackers, apples and oranges in her classroom closet. “If they are worrying about what they are going to eat,” she said, “it makes it hard to teach.”

Teachers in the district say hungry students come from families where parents have low-paying jobs or are unemployed and struggle to put three meals on the table. Other parents, they say, catch early buses to their jobs, leaving young children to get themselves up, fed, and to school. Some parents are neglectful. “Kids should have breakfast and dinner with their families. But that isn’t always realistic,” said Kathleen Hiatt, president of the East Whittier Education Association.

At schools without breakfast, hunger’s toll is evident. A survey last year in Pomona Unified found that a third of all visits to the school nurse were hunger-related stomach and head ailments, said health services coordinator Sharon Goodrich. Three needy schools in the district have no breakfast program.

Alhambra’s food service director, Marilynn Wells, has unsuccessfully pushed for six years to institute breakfast at Monterey-Highlands Elementary. “It is just one more thing they have to deal with. They don’t want to,” Wells said.

A state Education Department survey earlier this year found that philosophical objections were the primary reason principals and superintendents give for not offering the government-financed meal. “The media attention is putting pressure on principals to provide breakfast to their students,” said Wells.