More children than ever are eating breakfast in school, but the percentage still is far behind where the Food Research and Action Center believes it should be. FRAC has made several recommendations to help school pick up the pace.
In its 2008 School Breakfast Scoreboard, FRAC says that 8.5 million low-income children ate breakfast in school, 4% more than in 2006-07. The ratio of breakfast to lunch—46 children eating breakfast for every 100 who ate lunch—also is up, but far below the 60-to-100 ratio that is FRAC’s goal.
“If the . . . ratio had reached the goal, 2.5 million more children would have been eating a healthy school breakfast every day, and states would have received an additional $561 million in federal child nutrition funding.”
Only two states, New Mexico and South Carolina, surpassed that goal, although seven other states were at 55 or above. The states with the lowest ratio were Alaska, Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire and Utah.
FRAC has made several recommendations to the Obama administration, including supporting more universal free breakfast programs, raising the income eligibility for free breakfast to 185% of the poverty level and providing more USDA commodities to schools for breakfast.