"Start every day with a good breakfast." How many of us heard this as kids in school?
Many of us don't eat breakfast, content to fuel up later in the day. But what if you're a child that missed breakfast because your family simply doesn't have the food or the money to buy it? If you skipped breakfast this morning, you have something in common with about 16 million poor children in the U.S.
A new survey from Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit, provides a startling look at the faces of hunger awaiting teachers as they return to classrooms this month. In a nationwide poll of K-8 public school teachers, three out of five reported that children in their classrooms regularly come to school hungry. Among those teachers, 80 percent said children come to school hungry at least once a week, and more than half who witness hunger say the problem is getting worse.
If we're honest with ourselves, the faces of hunger are everywhere -- in every area, every city and every demographic. The 2012 edition of the 'Kids Count' report, one of the most widely quoted surveys on the condition of children in the U.S., indicates that child poverty is mounting. This is not just an issue of an extra donut or bagel. This is chronic hunger affecting millions of children every day, and the consequences are staggering.
Malnourishment can hinder more than just a child's physical development; it can impair cognitive and behavioral development as well. Children without proper nutrition face slower growth, more illnesses, and fatigue. Hungry children are twice as likely to be absent from school and four times as likely to experience difficulty concentrating than their peers who are not suffering from hunger.
The ultimate tragedy is that hunger is totally preventable. The Great Recession has exacerbated child poverty, yet the social safety net has helped alleviate some of this suffering. For instance, food stamps reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty by half last year. In the Share Our Strength survey, a majority of teachers (56 percent) say "a lot" or "most" of their students rely on school meals as their primary source of nutrition.
I'm tempted to rant about a cruel Congress willing to slash school meal programs and the safety net sustaining many children and families, and a Republican presidential ticket that co-signs this shameful approach. But I digress.
Ensuring that children have breakfast in the morning is vital to reducing child hunger and improving student learning. Recognizing this critical link, NEA is supporting the expansion of school breakfast programs that provide children with nutritious meals. Through the NEA Health Information Network's Breakfast in the Classroom, we worked in partnerships at the national and local levels to feed some 10,000 students last year. We're creating and sharing resources to increase public understanding about the severity of child hunger, and building networks of NEA members across the country, taking action to end child hunger.
Teachers and education support professionals know students can't learn if they are hungry. We will continue to accelerate our work to educate the public about the prevalence and impact of hunger on America's children. Until the scourge of child hunger in America ends, we all have a role to play to make sure children have the nutrition they need to do their best at school.
Follow Dennis Van Roekel on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@NEAMedia
Tavis Smiley: Ignore the Young, Forget the Old
http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2011/11/09/28234-school-breakfast-economics-add-up
Of course it must be ignored. It would involve change, and could be adopted within one school year.
There is a solution: http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2011/11/09/28234-school-breakfast-economics-add-up
But it does not involve more pay for teachers or the total elimination of accountability, so it is rejected.
You can feed a family a good healthy diet for not a great deal of money if you knew how to put together basic ingredients.
Start teaching kids how to cook. There isn't a fast food restaurant out there which can compare to the taste of a well prepared home cooked meal. And with training it is not all that difficult to make.
Do that and in a generation we see a very sharp decline in the number of kids going to school hungry.
Keep specu;ators and gamblers out, as these are not bussines thru the P&L sheets,
Thank You
"...Hunger can be a positive motivator..."
-- Cynthia Davis (R-MO) provided several “commentaries” on a program that provides “food during the summer for thousands of low-income Missouri children...” Davis extolled the hidden benefits of child hunger..[June 2009]
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Why don't the teachers in Chicago who are planning to go on strike, demand that the first order of business be that every child in every Chicago Public School has a free, tasty, breakfast, lunch and snack, without a means test.
Even if it means a smaller salary increase "accross the board".
Suppose for a moment that the 16M children number is real (5% of the TOTAL US population goes to school hungry regularly? Sounds fishy). What would daily breakfast cost for those kids? Somewhere between two and five dollars per school day (~20/mo). That's $40 - $100 per child per month, though the lower end is certainly achievable.
Yet, as the Heritage Foundation is so fond of pointing out (using Dept of Energy data), the majority of families LIVING AT OR BELOW THE POVERTY LINE enjoy amenities that cost more than that. For example, 75% of impoverished families use home air conditioners, two-thirds have cable or satellite TV, over half have a cell phone, and about a third have internet access. These are only the recurring costs; there are also plenty of one-time costs that are large compared to the cost of feeding a child.
HF also notes that there are truly impoverished families that legitimately have a difficult time putting food on the table, but they are a small percentage of households below the poverty line. Most simply decide to spend the money elsewhere.
It's a sad state of affairs that we live in a society that subsidizes TV and internet service providers by using food stamps. Whatever happened to asking not what your country could do for you, but what you could do for your country?
There is a simple answer. Many living in poverty have no idea how to raise children, or take care of themselves. At one time it was O.K. to talk about the Culture of Poverty, but that has become politically incorrect.
Let me urge you to Google a more appropriate term to describe those in poverty.
FUBAR. It is a military term.
But there is a low cost, almost no cost solution.
See: http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2011/11/09/28234-school-breakfast-economics-add-up
It's not the fairest approach, but all the other options blow up in your face. History has proven that trying to force people not to have children is not a power governments can be trusted with. And while charging parents who don't provide their kids with basic things like food, clothes, shelter and medical attention seems the most obvious way of holding adults responsible for their children, there are so many families living below the poverty line, you'd have to jail millions of parents - which certainly wouldn't make the country a better place or children.
So we just need to get the GOP out of the way, so people who *know* they can't afford to support kids don't wind up having them. And of course, young people need real educations (as opposed to abstinence only scams), so they can avoid winding up in dire circumstances. With the added bonus that stopping the other equally disasterous GOP policies, will strengthen the middle class so more people *can* afford to support children when they're ready to have them.
I agree with what you say, about family planning.
I do not agree it is unfair to provide people with the knowledge of how to enjoy sex, to its fullest, without worrying about more children.
It is the idea of sex that bothers, you isn't it. You can't stand the thought of it, so best neuter low income people.
It is essential if this earth is to survive that every female 10-55 has the ability to decide for herself, conveniently, and without cost, and WITHOUT COERCION, how many pregnancies she wants in her lifetimes.
I appreciate you would favor something more on the Chinese model, but that won't fly.
But it is precisely the effect of people who do have a problem with sex that makes sex a problem, because they're the ones who are trying to make birth control, condoms, and sexual knowledge unavailable so as to discourage people from having sex by making it as hazardous as possible.
And the results of their efforts are not a reduction in sexual activity, but a huge increase in unnecessary problems from sexual activity. The fact that they *know* this, but continue to attack anything which gives people control over their sex lives, shows us what their real goals are:
To hurt people who don't have sex the way the far right dictates as badly as possible. Because the far right would rather see a baby born with AIDS than have people having more and safer sex.
Well, it only took 5,000 years to change hunger as the killer to obesity as the killer. It will take more time to change the shift to plentiful healthy food.
There is a problem. Feeding children does not put additional money into teachers' paychecks, so it is a non-issue for 'educators".
See: Joel E. Cohen, a Mathematical biologist and the head of the Laboratory of Population at Rockefeller University and Columbia University. “How Many People Can the Earth Support?”
“Providing modern family planning methods to all people with unmet needs would cost about $6.7 billion a year, slightly less than the $6.9 billion that Americans are expected to spend for Halloween this year”.
The New York Times, Op-Ed October 24, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/opinion/seven-billion.html?pagewanted=all
Please post a llnk to the statistics you site. I really want to use it.