The breakfast club

The Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District’s school-breakfast program keeps getting more popular with kids and their parents.
“Participation has steadily increased each year, and figures from September through December were up across the board about 15 percent from the same period in 2005,” said D-Y Food Services Coordinator Garth Petracca.
In increasing numbers, D-Y children from families at all income levels are eating breakfast at school. For some, those extra minutes of sleep are more precious than sitting down to cereal and fruit in the family kitchen. For others, it’s a social event.
“A lot of kids get dropped off as early as 7:20 a.m., and I send them right up to the cafeteria, where they begin serving cold breakfast at 7:30 and hot food at 8,” said Mattacheese Middle School administrative assistant Judy Cash, who monitors the cafeteria during breakfast. “Kids sit with their friends, do homework, listen to music. Once they smell cinnamon and hot food, they get hungry and eat. They have a good time before school and go to class (homeroom starts at 8:25) ready to learn.”
The food is varied — bagel, egg and sausage sandwiches, cinnamon French toast, Western omelettes, blueberry pancakes, breakfast burritos — and everything is made with fresh ingredients. “They crack eggs and use real blueberries,” Cash says. Fresh fruit and juices, whole-wheat muffins and Danish, yogurt, whole-grain cereals and milk are served daily.
Petracca said the trick is to offer a variety of foods that appeal to kids. A fixed weekly hot-breakfast menu is served at the elementary schools, while daily surprises await middle school and high school students. “Kids are so choosey about what they like, so we put a lot of different things in front of them and let them decide.”
Timing is a critical factor to a successful school-breakfast program. “The bus schedule works for D-Y,” Petracca said. “We have time to feed the kids because there’s time between when they get off the buses and the first bell.” Between September and December, D-Y schools served 42,544 breakfasts, an increase of 4,357 over the same period in 2005. The biggest increase was at the high school, where more than 1,000 more breakfasts were served.

Everyone benefits
Research has proven the relationship between eating a nutritious breakfast and academic performance. Providing breakfast in the school setting is associated with improved grades, lower tardy rates and fewer disciplinary office referrals.
Students whose families’ incomes do not qualify them for free or reduced meals pay $1 a day for school breakfast — the cost is 30 cents a day for those on reduced payment. “The D-Y school district pays for nothing,” Petracca notes. “Food service is completely self-sufficient, subsidized by the USDA. Any revenue we bring in pays for lunchroom employees’ salaries and benefits.”
The importance of children eating breakfast has taken on new mew meaning in some schools. For many children attending Ezra Baker Elementary School in West Dennis, there’s only a 10- or 15-minute window between the arrival of buses and the start of school. “Teachers allow late arrivals to bring their breakfasts to the classroom,” Marsha Franklin, cafeteria cook/manager, said. “All children have the opportunity to eat a healthy breakfast, no matter how late they arrive at school.”
At Mattacheese, the parent-teacher organization has gone a step further. Beginning last year, the PTO raised funds to pay for all students to eat breakfast during the entire week of MCAS testing. Principal Emily Mezzetti said the school’s scores “did, indeed, go up,” but she said multiple factors were responsible, not just breakfast.
“Breakfast was part of the total package we provide to give our students every advantage going into the tests,” Mezzetti said. “We ask them to be well-rested, and we delay starting the testing until everybody’s wide awake, fed, energized and ready to go.”