Mom Talk

Breakfast and Blackboards: A Free Meal for BPS Kids

This school year, Boston began providing free breakfast for all students, sometimes right in the classroom. Not starting the day hungry is just the first benefit.

Stray whole-grain muffin crumbs are no match for the teachers at the Curley K-8 School in Jamaica Plain. Dustbusters in hand, they cope with the aftermath of the breakfast that’s served in their classrooms every day. The Universal Free Breakfast program began district-wide in Boston in September, and the Curley’s staff is just one group of adults who’ve converted to the idea of mixing yogurt with notebooks in the morning, to benefit students beyond having full tummies. Improvements in behavior, diet, and achievement have all been tracked in more than 15 years of research on learning and eating, especially the eating of breakfast. At first, teachers and custodians were understandably leery of bringing food into the classrooms, says Curley …

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