Congratulations to Breakfast After the Bell Grant Winners

Last fall, NAESP and No Kid Hungry partnered to increase access to school breakfast by providing grants to support Breakfast After the Bell in four schools across the country. Grant funds were available to schools with NAESP member principals seeking to implement a new or expand an existing Breakfast After the Bell model. Congratulations to the following schools for receiving grant funds to support their Breakfast After the Bell program!

  • Boulder Creek Elementary School | Boulder Creek Elementary/Gilbert Unified School District | Mesa, Arizona
  • Columbia Falls Jr. High School | Flathead County School District No. 6 | Columbia Falls, Montana
  • K William Harvey Elementary School | Ronan School District No 30 | Ronan, Montana
  • Big Piney Middle School | Sublette County School District No. 9 | Big Piney, Wyoming

We know that students do better when they start the day with a nutritious breakfast. Every time we feed a student school breakfast, we’re supporting their ability to achieve their future goals.

Making breakfast a seamless part of the day with Breakfast After the Bell models can also have a huge impact on classrooms and schools. Nearly 8 million students in the country are considered “chronically absent,” missing three weeks or more of the school year. A recent analysis conducted by researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara demonstrated that when schools implement Breakfast After the Bell models, it can have a significant impact on chronic absenteeism:

  • Breakfast After the Bell programs have the potential to decrease chronic absenteeism rates by an average of 6 percentage points. (For example, a school where 22% of students were chronically absent could see that drop to 16% after implementing Breakfast After the Bell, holding all other factors constant.)
  • Exploratory analysis also showed Breakfast in the Classroom can improve reading test scores and improve internalizing behaviors such as student anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem, and sadness.

“Breakfast After the Bell had a direct, positive impact on my building,” said Craig Crawford president of the Montana Association of Elementary & Middle School Principals“The benefits were far-reaching. I saw reduced behavioral incidents in the morning. This equated to several things- more time for me to be an instructional leader, more student time on task in the classrooms, increased test scores, and improved school climate. Teachers were able to focus less on how to manage kids being tardy and more on how to manage an entire class that has Maslow’s needs met and were ready to receive learning. The classroom communities were enhanced and the division of have and have not was further blurred or erased.”

A special thanks to the NAESP member principals in these schools and across the country for their continued commitment to ensuring every student has the nutrition they need to learn, grow, and thrive!

To learn more about implementing Breakfast After the Bell in your school, visit the No Kid Hungry Center for Best practices