It is an innovative, intuitive and increasingly common way to ensure that food reaches the mouths of hungry children from low-income families: give out free breakfast in the classroom at the start of each school day.
The results, seen at urban districts across the country, are striking. Without the stigma of a trip to the cafeteria, the number of students in Newark who eat breakfast in school has tripled. Absenteeism has fallen in Los Angeles, and officials in Chicago say children from low-income families are eating healthier meals, more often.
But New York City, a leader in public health reform, has balked at expanding the approach in its own schools, and City Hall is citing a surprising concern: that all those classroom Cheerios and cheese sticks could lead to more obesity.
Some children, it turns out, may be double-dipping.
The city’s health department hit the pause button after a study found that the Breakfast in the Classroom program, now used in 381 of the city’s 1,750 schools, was problematic because some children might be “inadvertently taking in excess calories by eating in multiple locations” — in other words, having a meal at home, or snacking on the way to school, then eating again in school.
But this week, the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, pushed back against those claims, joining children’s advocacy groups in demanding that New York follow other cities in making in-classroom breakfast available at many more schools with children from low-income families. They say hunger and poor nutrition are serious problems in a city where more than a quarter of residents under 18 are below the poverty line.
The breakfast battle echoes a national debate over the nutritional content of free and reduced-price school meals, a favored cause of the first lady, Michelle Obama. And the standoff leaves New York City’s policymakers in an uneasy place: trying to tackle children’s hunger while combating what has seemingly become a national epidemic of childhood obesity.
“They are both incredibly important, and so you have to constantly be in search of solutions where you can succeed in both, without disadvantaging the other,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. She noted that about 40 percent of New York’s elementary- and middle-school students were considered overweight or obese.
Outside Public School 180 in Harlem, one of the schools that offer breakfast in classrooms, several parents expressed surprise on Thursday that their children might be eating two morning meals. Abraham El Bey said his son, Noah, 8, usually eats breakfast at home, but Noah immediately volunteered that he ate breakfast at school, too.
“You can’t tell a kid, ‘No, you can’t have it,’ ” Mr. El Bey said with a shrug. “They need the fuel. I’m in favor of a child being able to eat in school.”
But Anne Morrison, whose son, Jude, 5, attends the same school, said she had adjusted what she fed him at home, knowing he would eat again at school.
“At school, it’s usually a muffin, a cheese stick and juice,” she said, adding, “I’m not so happy about the juice.”
New York offers breakfast at all its school cafeterias, but children generally have to show up before school starts to eat, and some are embarrassed to come forward for the free meal. When breakfast is served in the classroom, educators say, there is less stigma attached to it, and many more children accept it.
The concept of serving breakfast in the classroom, rather than in the cafeteria before the start of the school day, has gained traction in the past decade among educators and nutrition experts. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced New York City’s version of the program in 2008, as one of a series of measures intended to help poorer New Yorkers weather the impact of the then-new recession.
The Education Department assigned a staff member to coordinate the program and promote its benefits to principals around the city. The city chose the initial schools based on interest from a principal and a high percentage of students who qualified for free and reduced-price meals. Breakfasts can include yogurt, honey graham crackers and cinnamon-raisin bagels.
Since then, however, the coordinator has moved to a new position and the post has remained unfilled. There are no current plans to expand the program to additional schools.
Last year, when the City Council asked why the program had stalled, city officials cited the obesity risks uncovered by the health department study, which looked at the experience of elementary school students in 2010. More students were eating breakfast under the program, the study concluded, but about 21 percent of students were possibly eating two breakfasts.
In a letter to the city mailed this week, Ms. Quinn attacked the study’s methodology, saying it counted small items, like a slice of toast or a piece of a candy, as a wholly additional breakfast, and noted that it advocated further evaluation, not a halt to the program’s expansion. “While the prevention of obesity and diet-related disease is extremely important, it cannot be achieved at the expense of hungry children,” Ms. Quinn wrote.
Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, described the report in blunter terms. “It’s like you’re studying chemotherapy, and your only research question is whether it produces nausea, not whether it prevents recurrence of cancer,” said Mr. Berg, who dismissed the findings as “cockamamie.”
Ms. Gibbs, the deputy mayor, defended the study and its methodology, saying that it had used nationally accepted research methods and that no other group had produced a comparable analysis. “Nobody else, quite frankly, has the quality of information that we produced,” she said. She said the city was continuing to monitor the current program.
Other cities that have adopted the approach do not report major issues with obesity. To prevent double-dipping, the Newark public schools, which rolled out citywide classroom breakfasts in 2005, have a large outreach effort to ensure parents know about the free breakfasts and what will be on the menu.
J. Michael Murphy, a psychology professor at Harvard Medical School who has studied free classroom breakfasts, said that he considered obesity to be only a minor concern with such programs. But he conceded that well-meaning policymakers, trying to feed as many children as possible, could face a dilemma.
“What are you going to do?” Dr. Murphy asked. “Have a scale and say you can’t have the free breakfast because you’re already overweight?”
(Source: nytimes.com)
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