CHICOPEE — The Eos Foundation recently released its 2023-2024 study on the state of breakfast at Massachusetts’ high-poverty schools, Ending Hunger in Our Classrooms: Expanding After the Bell Breakfast to fuel student learning.
Eos Foundation is a private family trust which focuses on combating hunger, poverty, gender and racial equality.
Since 2013, the Eos Foundation has provided grants to schools to launch After the Bell Breakfast programs, focusing primarily on breakfast in the classroom.
The report found that just 48% of students enrolled in the commonwealth’s 813 high-poverty K-12 schools are receiving the free breakfast to which they are entitled, down from 58% during the 2019-20 academic year.
The federal government and the state of Massachusetts jointly fund programs that allow every child to eat every meal for free in our public schools.
In May 2023, Gov. Maura Healey signed into law School Meals for All making Massachusetts the eighth state in the country to provide free breakfast and lunch to any child in the K-12 system.
Eos Foundation President Andrea Silbert talked about the importance of conducting the study and releasing the results for schools to improve their numbers.
She said, “The critical message is that too many schools with high poverty populations are not providing breakfast after the bell and in the classroom and that has incredible consequences for kids ability to learn, to be healthy and around behavioral issues as well. There’s a lot of evidence that shows that eating breakfast is critical to the start of the school day and most kids don’t get breakfast before school.”
Silbert said she visited a high school in Western Massachusetts years ago and asked the students in a room how many of them ate breakfast before school and not one child raised their hand.
That school now has about 85% of kids participating in the breakfast program. Silbert said something she may talk about with Chicopee school is increasing their participation in the higher grade levels.
In Chicopee, the study found that 77% of students receive free school breakfast, ranking second of 54 high-poverty schools in the state but Silbert added that even though the percentage is great, it can be even higher.
In the report, he showed breakfast participation at Massachusetts schools for the month of October for the 2023-24 school year.
Out of all the schools in the district, many of the percentages of participation were above 75% with some schools at 100% participation but Bellamy Middle School was at 56% participation, Chicopee High School was at 55%, Dupont Middle School was at 33% and Chicopee Comprehensive High School was at 31% participation.
Those numbers can be low because most middle school and high school students must be at school by 7:30 a.m. or 8 a.m. and are either not hungry or don’t have time to eat.
Silbert gave a potential recommendation for how Chicopee can make sure those students eat.
She said, “What I would promote for Chicopee is to do what Springfield did and they’ve changed the school so that instead of having the block schedule, which makes it hard to do breakfast in the classroom, you just go to a 10-minute advisory every day and they all get their breakfast in the classroom. They would get even higher if the two high schools and middle school did it.”
The 2017-2018 report showed that Chicopee schools were only serving 50% of their students received breakfast so the numbers are still very promising, according to Silbert and she added, “I applaud them.”
The Eos Foundation is also distributing more than $100,000 in Healthy Start Grants to 109 schools and districts that serve breakfast to 80% or more of their students, including eight in Chicopee.
Barry Elementary School, Bowie Elementary School, Fairview Elementary School, Gen. John J. Stefanik Elementary School, Lambert Lavoie Elementary, Litwin, Streiber Memorial School, Szetela Early Childhood School are all receiving Healthy Start grants.
“Universal free breakfast, after-the-bell and in the classroom, is the single greatest opportunity to reduce child hunger in our state, removing the stigma and encouraging all students to break bread together,” said Silbert, “It results in higher academic achievement, fewer nurse visits, better nutrition and increased funding for school nutrition department budgets.”
The report found that if all 813 of the state’s high-poverty schools reached 80% of their students with free breakfast, 150,000 more young people would eat school breakfast each day and collectively, these schools would receive an additional $67 million in federal U.S. Department of Agriculture reimbursements, which is currently being forfeited.
