Eating breakfast boosts students' classroom performance

DeKALB – About 150 students at Tyler Elementary school ate a bagel with cream cheese, apple and milk for breakfast this week.

Students devoured the meals made available by the school in the cafeteria before heading to their classrooms. It’s not just Tyler Elementary School. Similar scenes played out in schools across DeKalb School District 428 to help students such as 7-year-old Elli Moon prepare for the rest of their day.

“If you don’t get breakfast, you want to go to lunch,” Elli, a second-grader, said. “And that just spoils your learning.”

Although many DeKalb County schools offer breakfast, some advocates say not enough children take advantage of the program. Those advocates, including officials at the Illinois Hunger Coalition, want to see more children eat breakfast as a means to increase their chances of school success.

Andria Mitchell, the principal at Tyler, has seen children eating breakfast offered by the school for years. Illinois’ Childhood Hunger Relief Act requires school districts to implement the School Breakfast Program in each school where at least 40 percent of students qualify for free and reduced-priced lunch. Illinois State Board of Education data shows last school year, nearly 70 percent of Tyler Elementary students qualified.

“A lot of times our babies come to school not having breakfast, for whatever reason,” Mitchell said.

Children who regularly eat breakfast are healthier overall, more likely to participate in physical activity and better able to concentrate, according to doctors at kidshealth.org, a youth health information project created by The Nemours Foundation. At Tyler, Mitchell said those facts hold true.

“A lot of our children would not be able to concentrate on learning,” Mitchell said. “I don’t think students would be learning as much if they were focused on eating.”

Katie Klus, the child nutrition coordinator for the Illinois Hunger Coalition, said she would like to see more low-income students eating breakfast at school. She cited the School Breakfast Scorecard from the Food Research and Action Center, which reported that 45 low-income students ate school breakfast for every 100 that received free or reduced-price lunch in Illinois.

Klus would like that ratio to be closer to 70 breakfasts for every 100 lunches. Local school officials could do several things to boost their school breakfast participation, she said, including offering breakfast in the classroom, on the bus to school or as a grab and go option.

“For far too many of them, school meals are the only meals that students can count on,” Klus said. “So school breakfast gives them a good foundation.”

Sycamore School District 427 adjusted its bus schedules by 10 minutes so more students had a chance to eat breakfast before class, said Director of Operations Kreg Wesley. The district has offered breakfast to students in kindergarten through eighth grade for three years, he said. Overall, about half of the students who eat breakfast at school qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, he said.

About 200 of the 1,400 kindergarten through fifth-grade students eat breakfast daily at school, he said. At the middle school level it’s about 40 out of the 900 students, which he attributed to stigma surrounding eating school breakfast.

“We’re hoping that when some of the kindergartners reach middle school, they are going to feel like they’ve always eaten breakfast,” Wesley said.

Kris Mulso, the executive assistant to the superintendent at Genoa-Kingston School District 424, said at the peak in February, 22 percent of the district’s students ate school breakfast, a majority of those free- and reduced-price lunch students.

Genoa-Kingston also has offered the program for three years. As to whether the breakfast program had any chance of being cut from the budget, the answer is pretty clear.

“Absolutely not,” Mulso said. “The kids perform so much better if they get breakfast.”

By the numbers

3,331: Illinois schools that offer the School Breakfast Program

380,458: Illinois students who eat school breakfast

376,272: Illinois students who eat free and reduced price school breakfast

Source: Food Research and Action Center