The morning fog from the San Francisco Bay often drifts up into the Oakland Hills, it swirls around the luxury cars parked along the quiet street in front of Montclair Elementary. Neighboring cafes advertise artisanal coffee and sandwiches made with local organic produce. On week days, kids stream into the elementary school’s open doors, few children that live in this neighborhood struggle with hunger.
“We’re in the Oakland Hills, which is considered very nice, houses are expensive, some of these kids take better vacations than I do,” Principal Nancy Bloom explains. “But, 47% of my kids don’t come from this neighborhood.”
Principal Nancy Bloom knows what it’s like to grow up hungry.
“I grew up really, really poor and there weren’t the food programs that there are now. I always swore if I ran a school, that there would be nothing that would identify kids based on their financial capacity at home. That is something that I have always felt very viscerally about, because it affected me as a kid.”
"If I ran a school, there would be nothing that would identify kids based on their financial capacity at home."
Nearly 20% of children in her school qualify for a free or reduced price lunch. But she doesn’t want them to feel singled out. That’s why during the first 30 minutes of the school day, every kid at Principal Bloom’s school can eat a free healthy breakfast.
“It’s allowing kids to actually learn and focus, and because everyone can avail themselves of the free breakfast, there is no stigma about ‘you get breakfast and I don’t’. We don’t have any of that.”
School breakfast is doing more than just preventing kids at Montclair Elementary from feeling singled out. Before Principal Bloom started the program, the school did not offer any kind of breakfast, and it had a tremendous effect.
Making breakfast a part of the school day is the fastest way to end childhood hunger at school. It means that a kid without food at home will still start their school day on a full stomach. It also means no kid has to feel like “the poor kid” forced to eat a separate breakfast from their peers, tucked away in the cafeteria before the school day starts.
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