Kids do better when they start the day right. Research shows that the simple act of eating school breakfast can dramatically change a child’s life. Making school breakfast a seamless part of the school day by serving it after the bell can also have a huge impact on classrooms.
Below are five ways school breakfast benefits kids:
Higher Test Scores: Hunger makes school harder. Students who eat school breakfast achieve higher scores on standardized tests.
Calmer Classrooms: Children who do not regularly get enough nutritious food to eat tend to have significantly higher levels of behavioral, emotional and educational problems.
Fewer Trips To The Nurse: When kids come to school hungry, they visit the school nurse more often due to stomachaches and headaches. Kids who struggle with hunger are also likely to be sick more often, slower to recover from illness, hospitalized more frequently and more susceptible to obesity.
Stronger Attendance & Graduation Rates: Students who eat school breakfast attend more school days. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing three weeks or more of school, decreases by 6 percentage points on average when students have access to Breakfast After the Bell. Attendance is important, as students who attend class more regularly are 20 percent more likely to graduate from high school.
Maximizes Our Country’s Future: When children are hungry, they struggle to grow up into strong, healthy and productive members of our society. This comes at a massive cost to the American economy and its potential.
Every time we feed a child, we’re unlocking their ability to grow up to become the next future teachers, scientists and entrepreneurs. To learn more, the Study on Chronic Absenteeism and Breakfast After the Bell is new research that shows the impact serving breakfast as part of the school day has on student outcomes. In addition, the No Kid Hungry Starts with Breakfast report describes a social impact analysis that examines the impact school breakfast has on kids and classrooms.
Schools are facing a crisis of chronic absenteeism: nearly 8 million students are missing at least three weeks of the school year. Chronic absenteeism can lead to lower academic achievement, greater risk of dropping out, and worse employment prospects. In 2019, the No Kid Hungry campaign commissioned a study, conducted by the University of California Santa Barbara, to examine whether serving breakfast after the bell can reduce chronic absenteeism.
This social impact analysis shows that the simple act of feeding kids a healthy school breakfast can have a dramatic impact on their academic performance, health and economic futures.
