The Birmingham Board of Education building downtown. Randall Woodfin, BOE president, says he is “excited” about the new free lunch program. Photo by Cody Owens.
Every child in Birmingham City Schools — all 24,427 hungry kids — now qualify to receive breakfast and lunch every day for free.
“[Birmingham City Schools] has had a 85-90 percent free/reduced lunch population for a number of years. Meaning the vast majority of students in our schools qualify for the program,” Birmingham City Schools Superintendent Craig Witherspoon explained.
Because of the high number of homes who previously qualified for free lunches, “Moving to this Community Eligibility Program was a logical next step for the school system,” Witherspoon said, referring to the newly adopted provision with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs.
“That said, most qualify through a process called direct certification prior to the start of each school year and did not have to complete the annual application process,” Witherspoon continued, adding that he hopes the parents of children enrolled in Birmingham schools can have one less form to fill out.
There have been many studies that prove children who are hungry will be fighting an uphill battle in the classroom. Child Food Insecurity: The Economic Impact on our Nation, a study published in 2008 by the organization Feeding America, concluded that, “Food insecurity and hunger damage the architecture of children’s brains, and that makes it extremely difficult for them to ever reach their full potential as effective workers and members of society. As a result of that we all lose.”
Alabama is a hungry state, and that statement is not even based on state’s larger-than-life obesity rates (the Centers for Disease Control estimate that the adult obesity rate in Alabama is 32.4 percent). According to a study conducted in 2012 by the Food Research and Action Center, Alabama has the fourth highest rate of “Food Hardships” in the nation.
This data, collected by Gallup, is based on the response to the question, “Have there been times in the past twelve months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”
The rate at which respondents in Alabama answered “yes” to that question was 23.6 percent, which is above the national average of 18.2 percent, according to the study published by the FRAC.
Out of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States that responded to the 2012 Gallup survey, Birmingham-Hoover ranked 11th in number of reported food hardships at 20.8 percent.
Randall Woodfin, president of the Birmingham school board, said he is excited about this new initiative and hopes it can make a substantial impact on the lives of those children who may come to school hungry. “We’re getting breakfast and lunch to every one of our students regardless of the income of the home. Every child should have nourishment and should have food if there is any expectation that when they get to school they will be focused on learning,” Woodfin said.
“Even as an adult, I can’t focus if I’m really hungry,” he added.
As Witherspoon noted, about 82 percent of the children in Birmingham schools received free lunches last year. He also said that this new provision “is funded through the federally funded Child Nutrition Program.”
For parents who may not have previously qualified for the free lunch program, the $50 or so dollars a month per child they were spending on lunches could still be a financial strain, explained Meg Bruck-Krawitz, who serves as the president of the parent-teacher association at Avondale Elementary.
“I’ve got three children at the school. One of them eats breakfast and lunch. That comes to about $40 dollars a week,” Bruck-Krawitz said, adding that though it was not necessarily a financial burden for her family, there are plenty of people who may not be able to afford paying that much per week.
“Thinking about those families who were right on the edge of qualifying for the free-lunch program who don’t qualify, just with one kid, it’s about $50 a month for lunch. That’s a big part of someone’s budget if they are earning $40,000 a year as a family,” Bruck-Krawitz said. “I just think a lot of families fell through the cracks with the old program.”
