More schools serving 3 meals a day to kids

Associated Press

KANSAS CITY, Mo.

Too often, it is after the fact that teachers discover their students are worrying less about math and reading and more about where the next meal comes from.

So Doug White, principal of Garfield Elementary School in inner-city Kansas City, was relieved when his school, like many across the country, began offering dinner to students enrolled in after-school child-care or tutoring programs.

With breakfast and lunch already provided for poor students, many children now are getting all their meals at school.

“When you know about those situations those kids are bringing into the school, and we are asking them to sit down and concentrate and do their work, and they might be hungry and we haven’t been made aware of it yet — we definitely want to do everything we can to help the kids,” White said.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 2010, provides federal funds for the after-school dinner program in areas where at least half the students qualify for free or reduced- price lunches. Before the change, the program was limited to 13 states and the District of Columbia. Most states had provided money only for after-school snacks.

Since the change, districts have started rolling out dinner programs both in states newly able to offer them and states such as Missouri where funding was available previously but districts didn’t always know about it. The Congressional Budget Office estimates there will be almost 21 million additional suppers served by 2015, and that number will rise to 29 million by 2020.

Advocates for the poor praise the program, but there have been complaints from conservatives who question whether the schools should be feeding kids three meals a day.