The very idea of a free breakfast for all school kids is … well... no one can argue against it being very nice. But when trustees in the Boise School District agreed to a free breakfast program – with a price tag over $2 million – there were several assumptions.
Will it improve the well-being of students? Might it improve their academic performance? Will it improve absences or tardies?
And how might it have an impact on student behavior?
Those questions and many, many more sparked this must-read research.
“A lot of our in-depth information came from talking to teachers and parents about their perceived ideas about student behavior,” said Dr. Michael Kreiter, sociologist and researcher from the Syringa State Community Research Lab. “We had seven focus groups. A lot of them reported that they noticed a big difference from previous years when not all students had access to a free school breakfast. So, they were seeing participation go up; they noticed a lot more engagement.”
Another thing that the researchers found was a tangible improvement in tardiness.
“We were able to calculate the change from year to year, and the change in tardies for some schools was significant. At one school, Taft Elementary, there was a 39% improvement in tardiness” said McAlister Hall who spends her days researching education for the Idaho Policy Institute. “The top ten schools experiencing the greatest decrease in tardies all had an increase in participation in school breakfast. It crosses elementary schools, junior high, senior high schools … across the district, no matter what; we saw that drop in tardies.”
And then there’s the stigma. For generations, students who got a free breakfast or lunch at school are emotionally tagged. Indeed, the stigma of the “free lunch kids,” quickly evaporated, when the Boise School District made it free for all kids, no matter their parent’s economic status, no matter their demographic. Nothing mattered … accept the idea of giving a nutritious breakfast to every kid in the district.
“When the free breakfast program was introduced, families accessed it more,” said Dr. Arthur Scarritt, also from the Syringa State Community Research Lab. “The barriers were dropped. Across the board, people were getting food. It wasn’t rocket science. Having food improves your ability to do everything in school. You can see the energy level increase when they eat. It’s not surprising that this was enormously successful across so many demographics and in so many different ways.”
Hall, Kreiter and Scarritt visited with Morning Edition host George Prentice to talk about their research and how much they loved working on the project.
Find reporter George Prentice @georgepren
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