School Breakfast Report Card

Pennsylvania's school breakfast programs grew by 3,750 breakfasts a day in 2000-01. The statewide total - 167,000 breakfasts a day - is up 2.3 percent from the previous year.

School lunch programs served about 915,000 lunches a day in Pennsylvania, more than five times the breakfast total. However, the gap between the two programs has been slowly narrowing over the years as breakfast participation has grown and lunch participation has remained stable. As part of its ongoing review of Pennsylvania's use of child nutrition opportunities, Hunger Action reviewed Department of Education school district breakfast data. Key findings follow.

Star Performers

In many schools, breakfast is perceived as an activity reserved for "the poor kids". This stigma is reinforced by administrative practices that treat breakfast participants as a minority, segregated from the usual flow of morning school activities.

"Star Performers" are school districts that treat nutrition as a key element in achieving academic excellence. Because they want all children to be ready to learn, these districts integrate breakfast into the normal school day and encourage everyone to participate. Selected for recognition are districts in which breakfast participation was at least twice as good as the statewide average. Leading the way in 2000-01 was Farrell Area School District in Mercer County (where breakfast participation was 86 percent of lunch participation) and four districts from Beaver County. Statewide, average breakfast participation was only 18 percent of average lunch participation.

Moving Up

Last year six school districts with a high share of low-income children started breakfast programs. These districts, as different as urban Upper Darby (7,800 students in Delaware County) and Salisbury-Elk Lick (400 students in Somerset County), are headed the right direction.

Failing Their Students

Ten districts with large shares of low-income students served no breakfasts at all. Shamokin Area School District in Northumberland County, where nearly half of the children qualified for free or reduced price breakfast, tops this list. Neighboring Schuylkill County contributed two districts (Pottsville Area and North Schuylkill).

Given the strong empirical evidence linking school breakfast with academic excellence, administrators in these ten districts need to take another look.

Needing to Improve

School districts function in multiple school buildings with children from ages 5 - 18. For a district to have a breakfast program is only the start; the next question is whether that program is available to children at all ages and in all the various settings.

Two participation patterns landed districts on "watch lists" in this regard. The first involved districts that have large numbers of needy students but low breakfast participation. Districts in the Lehigh Valley dominate this list. Daily participation in Allentown averaged just 9 percent of the total number of students who qualified for free or reduced price breakfast. In Bethlehem Area participation was just 12 percent; in Easton Area, participation was only 11 percent. In Upper Darby, which began breakfast in 2000-01, participation was under 4 percent.

Taking Advantage

Souderton Area School District in Montgomery County illustrates the second pattern. It has over 6,300 students, has operated a breakfast program for several years, and yet served only eight breakfasts each school day. Because it operates a breakfast program, in 2000-01 it received (in addition to federal payments to cover costs) over $8,000 in incentive payments from the state. That's a bonus of about $6 for every breakfast served. This pattern, which showed up across the state, takes advantage of PA's unique breakfast incentive payments.

"For years Pennsylvania has lagged behind other states in breakfast participation," said Berry Friesen of Hunger Action. "In 1992 led by John Peterson and Jim Rhoades, the Senate passed a bill that required every public school to offer breakfast. This approach ran into opposition in the House and so the Casey Administration implemented an incentive policy instead. The problem with the policy is that it permits districts to collect the incentive without serving breakfast to more than a handful of children."

In 1999-00 Pennsylvania was 38th in breakfast participation as compared to other states. According to Pat Birkenshaw, Director of the Division of Food and Nutrition in PDE, this disappointing showing has very little to do with how the breakfast program is funded. "Our schools receive more financial support for breakfast from the Commonwealth than schools in most other states receive from their state governments. The solution isn't money. It's simply a matter of local school boards and superintendents making the commitment to do the right thing."

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