More Schools in State Offer Breakfasts

The number of California children starting the school day with a federally subsidized breakfast on campus has shot up by nearly a quarter of a million in the last four years, according to a study by a national child nutrition research group.

Two-thirds of California’s schools offer breakfast, compared to 51% four years ago, according to the Food Research and Action Center in Washington. Child nutrition advocates say studies show that children benefit academically by eating breakfast. Educators at the schools that have added breakfast say the meal has led to improved attendance, behavior and academic performance.

However, more than 1 million California children who qualify for the free or reduced-price morning meal still do not get it, the study said. For bureaucratic or philosophical reasons, numerous districts choose not to participate.

In the 1992-93 school year, 531,000 low-income students ate breakfast at schools in California, according to the center. This year, that number is up to 776,607.

In the last year alone, 450 schools with 50,000 students in Southern California have joined the breakfast program, according to Los Angeles’ Interfaith Hunger Coalition.

The proportion of California schools offering subsidized breakfasts has risen slightly faster than the national average, but the state ranks below 31 states. Nationally, 71% of all schools serve breakfast to more than 5.6 million students, an all-time high.

“It is crucial that kids have a nutritious meal before they start learning,” said Michele Tingling-Clemmons, who coordinates the Food Research and Action Center’s national campaign to expand participation in the program. “Hungry children don’t learn well.”

In some of Orange County’s largest school districts, a majority of the students rely on free and reduced-price programs. The need continues to rise each year, administrators said.

At Santa Ana Unified, for instance, about 66% of the 51,000 students qualify for publicly funded meals.

“All our schools administer free or reduced lunches or breakfast programs,” Carol Godfrey, Santa Ana Unified’s food services director, said. “We have noticed a growth every year.”

This year, Santa Ana schools provided various free and reduced meals to almost 2,400 more students.

About 8,000 free breakfasts are served daily at 43 of the 63 Garden Grove Unified schools. This growing district launched 20 breakfast programs in the past two years after it was criticized for not meeting students’ needs.

Karen Papilli, Garden Grove food services director, said the district has worked swiftly in recent years to offer free breakfasts, but the efforts come with hidden costs and complications.

It did not take advantage of a one-time state grant for school breakfasts this year because operational costs would have strained the district’s budget.

“It doesn’t cover any ongoing costs, like the computers needed, the increased labor,” Papilli said.

Other complications include finding campus space and staff to run the breakfast services.

“Supervision is our biggest problem, because some schools don’t want kids on the grounds at a certain time,” she added. “If people are on the playgrounds in the morning, that presents obstacles for us to serve food.”

Any school can offer a subsidized breakfast program. The federal government reimburses the school district for each meal, and the state Department of Education provides start-up grants of up to $10,000 per school to buy equipment, such as coolers for milk.

“If we can’t stem the tide of poverty, we can make sure hungry kids have a meal to eat,” said Carolyn Olney, associate director of the Interfaith Hunger Coalition.

Teachers at Baldwin Park’s Geddes Elementary School say they have seen the change firsthand since they started serving breakfast in early 1995.

They remember when students regularly complained of early morning stomachaches and headaches. Those symptoms usually point to hunger, said fifth-grade teacher Cara Crawford. “Any time they eat, they have a better day,” she said.

Since the school began serving federally subsidized breakfasts, attendance is up and behavior problems are down, teachers say.

But the biggest payoff--which school officials feel is due at least in part to the free or reduced-price morning meals--is a dramatic improvement in student performance.

Student achievement has advanced by more than a full year in all but one grade, with most students performing above grade level in reading and math, said Principal Gloria Orozco.

First-grade teacher Lela Stone credits the breakfast program with encouraging students to come to school on time and enabling them to be more attentive in class.

She remembers what she called an extreme case when a student came to class on a Monday morning and simply put his head on his desk and kept it there. He had not had a meal over the entire weekend, she said.

“It was an unusual situation,” Stone said. “But if there had been a breakfast program then, at least he would have had a meal that morning.”

Between 60 and 80 students showed up when Geddes began its breakfast program, Orozco said. Now, about 250 of the school’s 900 students eat breakfast on campus.

“I come every day,” Arnold Villa, 10, a fifth-grader at Geddes, said recently over a burrito, milk and a fruit cup. “Every morning I have to hurry my little brother. I tell him we have to eat breakfast.”

Joseph Sanchez, 10, another fifth-grader, said: “If I don’t eat breakfast, I have a tummy ache. I feel better when I do.”

Scores of California schools applied for state start-up funds for breakfast programs two years ago after a Times series described how children in seemingly comfortable white-collar and working-class suburbs were going to school too hungry to learn.

Dozens of school districts that had held out against serving breakfast changed their minds. Many others did not.

Statewide, 544 schools with a low-income enrollment of at least 30%--the level needed to qualify for the subsidized program--do not offer breakfast. There are 34 such schools in Los Angeles County, 25 in Orange County and 59 in San Bernardino County.

Tingling-Clemmons of the Food Research and Action Center said that if “educators approach breakfast as a problem they want to resolve, they can generally resolve it. It is very rare that there is a problem in one district that has not been solved somewhere else.”

Some districts do not offer breakfast because officials believe that feeding children should be a family responsibility, not government’s.

But even the Orange Unified School District, where conservative school board members have suggested that counseling, for example, is best done in the home and not in schools, does offer the student breakfasts.

Also contributing to this report was Times staff writer Tina Nguyen.