Fitzsimon File

For the last 10 years, Queens Creek Elementary School in Swansboro has provided a free breakfast for all its kindergarten students. But not this year. There's an announcement on the schools' website that kindergarteners will have to buy breakfast on their own from now on.

North Carolina began the statewide kindergarten breakfast program on 2000 and the state spends $2.2 million a year to feed the students.

And it makes sense. Studies are clear that kids who eat breakfast before school are healthier overall than kids who don't.  And they do better in class and make higher scores on standardized tests.

Federal programs that provide free or reduced lunch and breakfast to poor students are important, but not enough. Some kids are embarrassed to participate because they don't want their classmates to know they are poor. Some families who earn too much to be eligible still can't afford breakfast every day and single moms often need the help.

All that prompted North Carolina lawmakers to establish a program that would provide breakfast for every student in kindergarten. No stigma, no eligibility requirements, just a basic breakfast for all the four and five year olds in their first year of school.

But not all elementary schools offer breakfast, just ones that have a certain percentage of poor children, based on eligibility levels for free and reduced lunch. The 2007 budget prohibits the State Board of Education from setting the eligibility percentage below 39.04 unless lawmakers provide money to expand the program.

The State Board asked lawmakers for $500,000 in new funding in 2007, but the final budget included no expansion. Neither did the 2008 budget, so kindergarten students in roughly a fourth of the elementary schools in the state don't get a free breakfast even if more than a third of the students at the school are poor.

It is not clear than another $500,000 a year would to pay for the program at all elementary schools but education officials say it might come close. Half a million dollars in a $21 billion budget isn't much to fully fund a program that lawmakers were wise enough to start nine years ago, especially when kids' nutrition and health is at stake.

The unwillingness to expand the breakfast program for kindergartners is far from the only problem schools face in addressing child nutrition. The State Board asked for $20 million this year to help schools offer healthier meals, an important part of the state's initiative to reduce childhood obesity.

The healthier meals proposal didn't get $20 million. It got nothing. Lawmakers instead funded a few obesity pilot projects, leaving schools scrambling with their food budgets and forcing many to fall back to cheaper, high calorie foods that make things worse, not better.

Legislative leaders like to boast about their commitment to public education. Too bad that commitment doesn't include supporting efforts to make sure kids are fed in the morning and eat the right food at lunch.

Too bad the kindergartners at Queens Creek Elementary won't get breakfast this year. 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.