UPDATE: ‘School Breakfast: Food for Thought,’ can be found here.

What did you have for breakfast this morning? I had oatmeal, cooked with almond milk, and topped with walnuts and dried blueberries.

Ask that question to a student though, and you might get some surprising answers. At Earlimart Elementary School, some students said they ate spaghetti, pizza, tamales, and Cocoa Puffs early that morning.

Others did not eat anything until 9:30 or 10 a.m. during the school’s Second Chance Breakfast, which the school offers to kids who did not make it to the school’s breakfast before the bell rang that morning.

Across the San Joaquín Valley, more school districts are beginning to implement non-traditional breakfast programs, like the Second Chance Breakfast in Earlimart. The programs are intended to improve a startling statistic: In California public schools, 2.3 million, or 70 percent of students eligible to receive free and reduced-price meals, are missing out on the benefits of a nutritious school breakfast.

(What is the school breakfast participation rate in your school district? Check out this table , from California Food Policy Advocates’ BreakfastFirst Campaign, to find out.)

By skipping the first meal of the day, students, families, and teachers lose out on so many benefits.

Studies show that breakfast increases kids’ health and improve their academic achievement. Also, teachers report fewer behavioral problems and higher attendance rates, school nurses see fewer students complaining of stomach aches, and school districts benefit from federal meal reimbursements.

“For me, from the beginning, it has almost seemed like a no-brainer,” said Ellen Braff-Guajardo, senior nutrition policy advocate with California Food Policy Advocates’ BreakfastFirst campaign. “It’s an opportunity for student to receive breakfast at school, and to help families in these economic times be able to meet other bills, like housing, and other necessities of life.”

Approaches like the second chance breakfast in Earlimart, and the classroom breakfast in Modesto and Sanger, are making a difference in the number of kids eating school breakfast. Read more about these programs and their benefits in the next edition of Vida en el Valle.

Want to read more from this blog about school meals, and their impact on children’s health?

• Food for Thought
• Schooled in Health

Top image by Daniel Cásarez. Bottom image from pugetsoundblogs.com.

The last story in our series on the importance of free, healthy summer lunches ran in this week’s edition of Vida en el Valle.

In this final story, I examined some of the creative ways that community organizations, school districts, and municipalities are ensuring that summer meals reach the hungry kids who need them.

But, experts say, local and national policy-makers and legislators also play a role in connecting lower-income kids with healthy meals.

City mayors, members of boards of education, and state senators and assemblymen can bring visibility to the school lunch programs by visiting them, and then promoting them through newsletters to constituents.

Assemblyman Juan Arambula, I-Fresno, is one legislator who has taken on the challenge of championing summer meals. His office helped organize a summer-meal kick-off event in Fresno in June.

This program is needed and particularly so in our part of California, and given our poverty and our unemployment, it only makes sense to try and bring in additional federal monies to help our people get through this rough time,” Arambula said.

At the national level, legislators in both houses of Congress must pass the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, experts said. The bills would help expand enrollment and participation in school meals, improve nutrition in school meals, lower eligibility raters for summer meal programs in rural areas, among other provisions, according to California Food Policy Advocates.

In an editorial in the Washington Post on Monday, First Lady Michelle Obama emphasized the need for a renewed child nutrition bill. She wrote:

We owe it to the children who aren’t reaching their potential because they’re not getting the nutrition they need during the day. We owe it to the parents who are working to keep their families healthy and looking for a little support along the way. We owe it to the schools that are trying to make progress but don’t have the resources they need. And we owe it to our country — because our prosperity depends on the health and vitality of the next generation.

The first story in the series - on the underutilization of federally funded summer meals programs – can be found here; the second story - on nutrition’s short- and long-term benefits on kids’ health and education – is here. Follow @HarvestHealth on Twitter for more news and updates about child nutrition.