Fuel for a better start at school

A shiny lunch bag, a pair of new running shoes, a pack of crayons and a pink backpack. These were the things I brought with me on my first day of school in September 2004.

But what my new teacher and classmates could not see immediately was the readiness that I brought, to leap into school: The years of being read to before bed, the hours spent watching educational television shows, the little bowls of peeled fruit I had been fed to keep a healthy brain going and my ability to read all on my own.

I wasn’t alone. Some of my classmates had been reading since they were three or went to preschool or were raised bilingual. But some of my classmates had never been read to in their lives. Preschool or daycare wasn’t within their parent’s budget. If they were a single parent, items such as books, fresh food and vitamins weren’t always accessible.

Middle school followed suit and I started to notice the size of my class decrease in small increments. Kids who I had sat next to on school buses and shared textbooks with just stopped coming.

People shrugged it off and called them early dropouts but I was uneasy. My what-abouttheir-education-worries came from being raised with the idea that education was our No. 1 priority, a thought put in place not only by my teachers but by my parents.

But when you come to school lacking energy (and probably breakfast) you likely don’t have the same type of pressure or necessity to go to school as other kids in the class do. Then why stay?

The problem is much deeper than not eating a granola bar or apple before class starts. There is little acknowledgment that the issue is generational and may take more than a bowl of breakfast to fix it. But that isn’t going to stop the Breakfast Club Program from giving out free food every morning at local elementary and high schools in attempts to fix it.

The concept of the Breakfast Club is that kids can have an equal start to their morning. Students are given granola bars, bags of cereal, cups of juice and goldfish crackers. To some, it’s the first thing they’ve eaten in a while; to others it’s just a second breakfast.

Science shows that students perform better in school when they are properly nourished but what science does not recognize is that the issue lies deep beneath hunger. The problem began 12 years ago when, perhaps, the child began school three reading levels below everyone else, through no fault of their own. It’s the best school boards can do. They’re trying to break the cycle.

On the Breakfast Club Canada website, readers can see the staggering number of children fed each morning by their school, but no numbers show us how the paths of the children are changed because of their morning bagel or juice box.

The socio-economic cycle is something everyone is trapped in, and something school boards are attempting to diminish.

Perhaps the daily deliverance of breakfast will help fuel one child’s potential for university. There’s not much else school boards can do, but the Breakfast Club is one way to start.