Hunger Pangs: The Empty-Stomach Problem
Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the
Economic Policy Institute and former education
columnist for the New York Times, observed that,
if raising test scores is our goal, food might be
the easy answer … “There's evidence to suggest
that giving every schoolchild a good breakfast
will raise test scores more than ending social
promotion, increasing accountability, or
requiring more testing. It's a fact that iron
deficiency anemia, twice as common in low-income
children as in better- off children, affects
cognitive ability. In experiments in which
students got inexpensive vitamin and mineral
supplements, reported Rothstein, "test scores
rose from that treatment alone." So where are the
demands in Congress for an Eat for Success
campaign? Plenty of us would march for No Child
Left Unfed.
by Susan Ohanian, "Capitalism, Calculus and
Conscience," Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 84,
2003
Maybe those kids sitting in the principal's
office are hungry.
by Andrea Orr
Susan Phillips, a teacher at Enfield Elementary
School, in rural Enfield, New York, recently
noticed that one of her fourth-grade students was
always cranky and distracted at the start of the
week but turned mild mannered by Tuesday.
It wasn't a case of the Monday-morning blues --
it was hunger. Her student ate pretty well on
subsidized school breakfasts, lunches, and after-
school snacks, but over the weekend, he just
couldn't get enough food at home. "We would feed
him practically nonstop throughout the day, and
by Tuesday he was back to his usual self,"
Phillips says.
The school got proactive and started sending its
neediest students home every Friday with a
backpack full of ready-to-eat provisions like
peanut butter crackers, granola bars, and
SpaghettiOs. Five of Phillips's twenty-eight
students got permission from their parents to
participate, and Monday mornings became a lot
easier. "I saw a dramatic change," Phillips says.
More than half a century ago, the National School
Lunch act was passed, allocating funds for
nutritious meals at school, and these days many
educators worry more about childhood obesity than
about malnutrition. Yet hunger among children
appears to be on the rise, prompting many food
banks to expand distribution to schoolchildren
while training teachers to identify students at
risk.
Schools in thirty-nine states and in Washington,
DC, send some 35,000 students home with food-
filled backpacks each week -- double the number
from the previous year -- through a program
organized by Feeding America, a national network
of food banks. Educators try to be discreet by
broaching the topic with students in private and
using plain, unlabeled backpacks, but many have
found that children are pretty comfortable
discussing hunger. "A lot of times, children are
telling the teachers that they are not eating,"
says Jan Pruitt, CEO of the North Texas Food
Bank, in Dallas, one of the largest food banks in
the country.
The food bank, which works to dispel the myth
that hunger is a problem confined to the homeless
or the unemployed, says 40 percent of the
households it serves have at least one employed
adult, and many have children. Even in wealthy
areas, kids can go hungry.
And though some signs of hunger, such as hoarding
food, may be obvious, subtler changes in behavior
or energy levels on Monday morning -- everything
from hyperactivity to poor attention span -- can
also signal a weekend with too little food.
Physical symptoms such as puffy skin, dry eyes,
or dry lips, furthermore, may indicate a vitamin
deficiency. Pruitt says teachers are often
surprised to learn that a "problem" student is
really just hungry: "They will say, 'Oh, my gosh.
I never thought of him being hungry.'"
In 2006, Feeding America estimated that one in
every six U.S. children lacks adequate amounts of
nutritious food on a regular basis. No
comprehensive study has been conducted since
then, but teachers and food-bank workers have
observed the problem getting worse as rising food
and fuel prices, high unemployment, and rampant
home foreclosures squeeze more families. In
upstate New York, the Food Bank of the Southern
Tier recently started supplying more food
backpacks when it heard from teachers about
students showing up with headaches or other
hunger-related problems that made it hard to
concentrate.
"It's not a good year," says Maura Daly, vice
president of government relations and advocacy at
Feeding America, which is seeing a 20 percent
increase in food-bank demand over last year. "I'd
say it's a perfect storm."
Teachers who make an effort to identify and get
help for hungry students are often rewarded with
a more manageable classroom environment. Hunger
in children is linked to a long list of physical
and behavioral problems, from tardiness and
absenteeism to anxiety, aggression, and poor
social interaction. "There may be only one child
in the class who is hungry," says food-bank CEO
Jan Pruitt, "but his or her behavior can affect
everybody."
Andrea Orr is a freelance writer in San
Francisco.
— Andrea Orr
Edutopia
2008-12-01
http://www.edutopia.org/student-hunger-nutrition-food-banks
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
