Through an amazing grant opportunity offered by the Food Research and Action Center, NAESP Foundation and several other groups, recently joined the Partners for Breakfast in the Classroom to bring the Breakfast in the Classroom program to Pennsylvania school districts.

Breakfast in the Classroom takes the traditional school breakfast approach and improves it by moving it to the classroom. Breakfast is available to every child, no matter the family’s income level, making it possible for all children to participate. There are more than 25 million children in our nation’s schools, many of whom come to school hungry. What happens next is heartbreaking. Their attention spans shorten. Their energy levels plummet. Their productivity wanes. Learning suffers. Lives suffer. It’s time to start a movement to change that. The solution? Breakfast in the Classroom. It’s a fact: eating breakfast at school helps children learn. Studies show that children who eat breakfast at the start of their school day have higher math and reading scores.        

In addition, a number of PA organizations are working to increase breakfast participation in Pennsylvania and to do so, they are sponsoring the Second Pennsylvania School Breakfast Challenge to help highlight the importance of school breakfast and offer incentives to schools that make meaningful changes to increase student access to school breakfast: http://www.hungercoalition.org/breakfast.

PA Principals Association will continue to promote the Breakfast in the Classroom program in our publications, website, broadcast emails and at the annual conference. Other Pennsylvania partners include: Public Citizens for Children and Youth, the Pennsylvania State Education Association and the School Nutrition Association of Pennsylvania.

With generous funding from the Walmart Foundation, grants are available to start a Breakfast in the Classroom program in your school district and/or school. For more information, contact Etienne Melcher at EMelcher@frac.org.

If you require more information about the partnership and/or the Breakfast in the Classroom program, please check out the links below:

• Website: http://breakfastintheclassroom.org/

• FRAC’s Breakfast for Learning brief: http://frac.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/breakfastforlearning.pdf 

• FRAC’s School Breakfast Scorecard with PA stats: http://frac.org/pdf/School_Breakfast_Scorecard_SY_2013_2014.pdf