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Program Review

The School Breakfast Program is an underutilized resource against childhood hunger in our community.

According to the most recent information available from the California Department of Education, Sacramento county's schools were much less likely to offer a school breakfast to their students than they were a lunch during the 1990-91 school year. While almost 16,235,000 school lunches were served to Sacramento's children that year, only 4,635,106 breakfasts were served during the same period.

This discrepancy is siqnificant, since statistics show that it is predominantly low-income children who benefit from the school breakfast program. For example, 66 percent of all lunches served in Sacramento's schools during 1990-91 went to limited-income students. In contrast, 97 percent of the students who received a school breakfast in Sacramento County during that same period were from limited-income families. While some of this discrepency can be explained by the fact that school breakfast is only being offered locally in schools which have over 50 percent of their enrollment eliqible for free or reduced price meals, the variation is so significant as to warrant further investigation.

According to information provided by the california Department of Education, there were as of october 1990 more than 30 schools within Sacramento County, which had 40 percent or more of their enrolled students eligible for free or reduced price school meals, yet they were not offering a school breakfast program. Fourteen of these schools had more than 50 percent of their enrolled students living in limited-income families.

An extensive study conducted in Boston, Massachusetts has documented that provision of a school breakfast program can result in significant improvement in standardized test scores and reduction in tardiness and absenteeism. Local school officials have long recognized that a hungry child has a reduced capacity to learn. In schools with no federal breakfast program, principals will often send hungry children to the cafeteria for a snack in the morning. At least one local principal routinely secures food donations from community resources to provide breakfast to the hungry students of the school. This particular district does not operate a breakfast program at any of its sites.

Sacramento's rising unemployment rate and the freezing of public assistance benefits may be contributing factors to increasing demand for school meals. The Sacramento City Unified School District, for example, reports that they are serving 10 percent more lunches during 1991-92 than they served on the average during the last school year. Providing school breakfasts, in addition to school lunches, for our hungqry children is an available resource which Sacramento schools should utilize more extensively.

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