Maryland Gov Martin O’Malley was at Eastport Elementary School yesterday, along with state and local education leaders, leading the charge for an additional $1.8 million in state funding to supplement a school breakfast program already working in the state, the Capital Gazette reports.
About 33,000 Maryland students already get free breakfasts at their desks before school starts. Every student at schools where more than 40 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals can get milk, fruits, and other breakfast items through the program at no cost. The additional funds would add 57,000 students to the rolls of the Maryland Meals for Achievement Program.
Speaking about students in the state’s schools, Mr O’Malley said, “Of all the innovations we can implement, the one that helps the most in their brains and their hearts is filling their stomachs.”
Some analysts predict that if 70 percent of elementary and middle school students eating a free or reduced-price lunch also were getting a school breakfast, it could lead to 47,955 fewer absences annually and have subsequent positive effects on standardized math tests and high school graduation rates.
According to state schools Superintendent Lillian Lowery, fewer than 20 percent of students in the state’s public schools participate in the traditional school breakfast program. The USDA recently revised guidelines for this program, as we reported last summer.
We’ve known about the link between school breakfasts and academic performance—at least in the short term—for some time. A comprehensive 1998 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics concluded:
Both cross-sectional and longitudinal data from this study provide strong evidence that higher rates of participation in school breakfast programs are associated in the short-term with improved student functioning on a broad range of psychosocial and academic measures.
And just last year, Danielle E. Griswold submitted her thesis to Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy saying essentially the same thing after analyzing data from 1999 to 2007:
The probability of having excessive unexcused absences and tardies serves as a proxy for poor academic performance, as individuals who spend less time in class often perform lower than peers with consistent attendance. I find that eating school breakfast and attending a school that offers the School Breakfast Program is associated with increases in reading and math test scores over time, both in the early formative years and across the entire sample of kindergarten to eighth grade, particularly in the area of mathematics.