Bill will ensure breakfast for kids who need it
Bill will ensure breakfast for kids who need it
01/22/2008
Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel
"To educate children, you must feed them."
So says Dr. Deborah Frank, professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. Frank has spent a lifetime studying children. Her research connects children's hunger or poor nutrition to subsequent developmental and health problems.
"They have trouble paying attention in school," she told us in an interview last summer.
Hungry children, she said, "have lower IQs, more attention deficit, all the things that keep us from succeeding in a knowledge economy."
But you don't need someone with advanced degrees to tell you what almost every Maine teacher can tell you: Hungry children can't learn. And there are lots of hungry children in Maine classrooms.
As we reported in our seven-part series last summer, "For I was Hungry," Maine has the fastest-growing population of hungry people in the nation.
As the economy worsens, with home heating and gas prices crushing even middle-class families, the amount of food on Maine's tables and in Maine children's lunchboxes diminishes.
While the federally funded school lunch program puts food in the mouths of many of Maine's children, that one nutritious meal a day isn't enough to fuel a growing mind and body.
And sadly, as school staff across the state can tell you, often the only real meal a child will get is school lunch.
Yet there is a way to help Maine's hungry children.
Currently, only 42 percent of Maine children whose families are poor enough to qualify for subsidized or free breakfasts get those breakfasts.
If we expanded the school breakfast program to even 60 percent of the eligible children, 9,000 more Maine school children would eat breakfast and the state's schools would get $1.8 million in federal money to pay for the additional meals.
Yet far too many of the state's schools -- while doing a good job at feeding kids lunch -- have simply found it too inconvenient or too much of an effort to organize preparing and serving school breakfast.
Children who could be eating and thus learning and functioning better are deprived of that chance.
This afternoon, lawmakers will hear testimony on a bill sponsored by Sen. Libby Mitchell, D-Vassalboro, and co-sponsored by Rep. Patrick Flood, R-Winthrop, to ensure that all children in Maine who are eligible for free and reduced-price breakfast get it while at school.
The bill is a simple, straightforward and low-cost way to answer the needs of one of Maine's most vulnerable populations, its hungry children. The bill requires $1.5 million (and possibly less) from the Fund for a Healthy Maine to pay for the expansion; that fund's money comes out of the 1998 state settlement with tobacco companies.
Whoa there, you might say -- who are we kidding?
The state's facing a huge budget shortfall, taxpayers can't spend any more on anyone or anything, parents should be feeding their kids anyway and when was the last time you looked at what kids throw out in a school cafeteria -- they're not eating the food we pay for anyway!
No more handouts -- all those welfare cheats buy booze and smokes with the money that's freed up when we feed them and their kids!
And we don't have any hungry kids -- Maine's got an epidemic of fat kids!
The state is indeed facing a huge budget shortfall, which is a reflection of larger economic woes across not only Maine but the nation as a whole. We need to cut state spending.
Even as we have advocated cuts in state spending, we also have urged protection of the most vulnerable of our citizens.
Hungry children -- who bear no responsibility for their predicament -- need to be fed.
The federal breakfast program pays a substantial portion of the cost of feeding them.
The state money that will fund school breakfast expansion does not come from Maine's general fund and does not come directly from Maine taxpayers.
It will be drawn from tobacco settlement money whose purpose is to improve the health of Mainers.
Next: Maine's fat children. Of course we have overweight children and adults in our state.
Food that's fatty and full of sugar is cheap; nutritious food is more expensive.
Those overweight kids in school are likely to be victims of poor nutrition -- as one child-care supervisor in Waterville told us, "26 Oreos don't make a good breakfast."
What Maine's obese kids need is better food than their parents can afford. Federally funded food programs must meet nutritional guidelines and studies have shown that kids who get school breakfast have significantly less risk of being obese.
On the other hand, the argument that kids don't eat everything put in front of them is no excuse not to feed them.
As for the argument that feeding children allows their parents to use their money for other things like cigarettes and alcohol -- while anecdotes abound about such cases, the sad truth is that denying hungry children food because of their parents' transgressions doesn't make sense either practically or morally.
At the end of the day, you still have hungry children.
Is it the responsibility of Maine's parents to feed their children? Yes, if they can. But a growing number can't and some don't.
Should we punish children for that? Of course not.
And furthermore, given the societal benefits of feeding kids breakfast, we're punishing ourselves by denying them the meal.
A landmark 1998 study published in the journal Pediatrics determined that hungry children are more likely to repeat a grade, need special education or mental health services and have lower academic performance. That costs society, not just the children.
As lawmakers face a vote on the school breakfast bill, we ask them to consider this: Most of Maine's schools provide extra food to children on days when standardized tests are given. Why?
The answer is obvious.
And its significance is compelling.
If we feed children on test days, we should feed them on all other days.
Copyright © 2008, Blethen Maine Newspapers, Inc.
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