Free for All: Chicago Brings Breakfast to Every Elementary School Classroom

Dana Chivvis //May. 12, 2011 // 12:00 AM

Chicago Public Schools are putting the government’s money where its mouth is. 

A new federally funded initiative in the district mandates that by June all elementary schools must begin serving a free breakfast at the start of the school day. A variation of this program has existed in the Windy City since 2009, but then the meal was served in the cafeteria before school. The new “Breakfast in the Classroom” program highlights the importance of good nutrition in educational outcomes, but it has also garnered criticism from parents and teachers who say it cuts into an already short school day.

Chicago made the change after determining that only 23 percent of kids ate free breakfast when it was served before school, while 70 percent of kids ate it when it was served at the start of the day in the classroom. A similar study conducted by the USDA from 2000 to 2003 found a significant increase in the number of kids who ate free breakfast when it was moved from the cafeteria to the classroom.

“We have to feed our bodies and we have to feed our brains,” said Anastasia McGee, director of the Chicago Partnership for Health Promotion at the University of Chicago. “And if our brains are hungry, they don’t work.”

Breakfast leads to better behavior in classrooms, better concentration, and better attendance, according to Eric Rimm, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. 

“A key to having a healthier next generation is to make some systematic changes,” Rimm said. “To me it’s fantastic that an entire city is deciding to serve kids.”

Of the major urban school districts in the country, only Newark, Detroit, Houston and Washington, D.C. also have a mandated universal free breakfast program, according to the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC.)

Since its inception in 1966, the school breakfast program has targeted schools serving low-income neighborhoods. In Chicago’s public elementary schools, 83 percent of students are eligible for a free lunch. But of those students, only 38 percent participated in the free breakfast program last year, according to FRAC.

At O’Keeffe Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side, 97.5 percent of the students are from low-income households.

“The kids are always saying, ‘What’s for breakfast?’” said Lois Ashford, a sixth grade teacher at O’Keeffe. Some of her students don’t get much to eat at home.

“One child, I can look at her and tell she’s not eating because usually on Monday she’s trying to get two breakfasts,” Ashford said.

But, while she sees the benefits of the breakfast program firsthand, she also has an issue with its timing. The 10 to 15 minutes for breakfast in the morning is time she used to have to prepare for the day.

A similar chorus of parental concern rang out in January. Two days before the school board voted to implement Breakfast in the Classroom, a petition was signed by parents who didn’t want any more time lopped off the school day – one of the shortest in the country. The letter was reportedly signed by more than a thousand parents.

“I’m supportive of the goals of the program, just not the means of implementing them,” said Terri Tomcisin, the mother of a third grader in the system. “We had a program in place, it worked, it didn’t take up instructional time, and to force this program -- to shorten an already short school day -- is not very student-oriented.”

When Principal John O’Connell began piloting the program in 2009 at Sheridan Elementary Math and Science Academy, he heard the same concerns from parents and some of his teachers. 

“There were different kinks that needed to be worked out,” he said. Parents were also concerned that their kids would start eating twice in the morning – once at home and again at school. And, given the bad name that school lunch food has earned over the years, there were concerns about the quality of the meals.

Those concerns were not unfounded. Until this school year, lax nutritional standards meant kids could be served breakfasts of pop tarts and “Super Donuts” – not crime-fighting breakfast pastries, but donuts that have been juiced up with nutrients. 

Chicago schools are now offering more fresh fruits and vegetables, restricting sugar and sodium, and requiring 25 percent of breakfast breads to be whole grains. 

“Something more would be more ideal, but they went from zero to 25 percent,” said Rochelle Davis, director of the Healthy Schools Campaign.

The breakfast menu in May still included dishes like “Brown Sugar Cinnamon French Toast,” but “Whole Grain Maple Oatmeal” was also offered. Not necessarily optimal breakfast standards, but certainly steps in the right direction.

After two or three months of the program at Sheridan, O’Connell says the concerns about lost instruction time, double breakfasts, and poor nutrition faded away. Now, two years later, he and his teachers eat the breakfast alongside their students.

Boeing Labor Fight Takes Over Harkin Hearing

MAY 12, 2011, 4:47 PM ET

By Melanie Trottman

An effort by Senate Democrats Thursday to highlight the problems of the middle class turned into a partisan debate over the merits of Boeing Co.’s effort to build a nonunion airplane factory – a project now under attack by the National Labor Relations Board.

Boeings’ new 787 Dreamliner takes off from Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport in February. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)

Chicago-based Boeing’s general counsel, invited by Republicans to be a witness at a Senate panel led by Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) , portrayed Boeing as a company that could be frustrated in its effort to create good-paying manufacturing jobs by the Democratic NLRB. The NLRB’s general counsel alleged Boeing violated federal labor law by locating the second production line for its 787 Dreamliner at the nonunion plant in South Carolina, siding with union workers in Washington state who said Boeing’s action was retaliation for past labor strikes.

The NLRB has scheduled a hearing in the matter for June 14 in Seattle – home to Boeing’s unionized production operations. “Presumptively, I do expect to lose,” Boeing’s General CounselMichael Luttig said. If he’s correct, Boeing would appeal to the agency’s majority Democrat board, a process he said he also expects the company would lose. He suggested the case could be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, taking several years and making it “exceedingly difficult” to determine whether to invest more in the South Carolina facility.

“This is not the way to encourage new job creation in the U.S. or even keep the jobs we currently have,” said Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, the ranking Republican on the Help Education Labor and Pensions Committee that convened the hearing. “The NLRB’s complaint is both legally unfounded and it is irresponsible.”

Democrats used much of their time to express support for unions and scold Republicans for making “political” a process that’s in the hands of an independent federal agency.

“This has become a political thing” that “borders almost on unethical activity” involving members of Congress interfering with a judicial process, said Mr. Harkin. He and other Democrats tried several times to steer the debate more toward taxes, infrastructure investment and education, but they couldn’t prevent the Boeing issue from resurfacing.

Mr. Harkin said he didn’t mean for the discussion to get “sidetracked into a narrow chute” and hoped to generate problem-solving ideas at future hearings. “I want to get to the essence of the middle class here,” he said.

Meanwhile, Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), andJim DeMint (R., S.C.) on Thursday introduced a bill that would prohibit the NLRB from ordering employers to relocate jobs and would protect an employer’s freedom to discuss the costs of having a unionized workforce.

Boeing lawyer tells Senate committee NLRB suit could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs
Y: Philip Klein 05/12/11 10:33 AM 
Senior Editorial Writer Follow Him @Philipaklein

If it succeeds, a suit by the National Labor Relations Board seeking to block Boeing from building airplanes in a non-union facility in South Carolina will set a precedent that could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide, the company's vice president and general counsel Michael Lutting said at a Senate hearing on Thursday.

Most directly, if Boeing is forced to shut down its new factory, it would kill thousands of jobs in South Carolina. But it would also have wider-ranging effects, Luttig argued in testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee.

Applied across the economy, Luttig said, it means that many companies that have production lines in unionized states won't be able to build additional facilities in right-to-work states. And on the flip side, companies won't want to open new factories in unionized states, because they'll be worried that they'll be limited in where they can expand in the future. Still other companies, Luttig said, would locate overseas.

The NLRB complaint calls for moving the new production line to the unionized Washington state, which Luttig described as a “breathtaking substitution of the board for management in the running of American company.”

He also dismissed the NLRB's charge that the factory was built to retaliate against the union.

“No company commits billions of dollars of capital to build a production facility out of spite,” Luttig said.

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Graham, DeMint, Alexander Introduce Job Protection Act

Senator Graham Press Releases
Contact: Meghan Hughes (202) 224-5972 / Kevin Bishop (864) 250-1417
Date: 05/12/2011

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) today introduced the Job Protection Act (S. 964), a bill to preserve federal law’s existing protections of state right-to-work laws. 

On April 20, the acting general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board moved to stop Boeing from building airplanes at a nonunion plant in South Carolina, suggesting that unionized American company cannot expand its operations into one of the 22 states with right-to-work laws, which protect a worker’s right to join or not join a union. 

Alexander said: “This is not just about South Carolina and it’s not just about making airplanes – this is about jobs in every state in the country, and whether or not manufacturers are going to be able to make in the United States what they sell in the United States. I can’t think of one single action the federal government would take that would make it harder to create new jobs in Tennessee than this Boeing complaint, if it’s allowed to move forward.” 

Graham said: “The NLRB is doing the bidding of the unions at a great cost to South Carolina and our nation’s economy. I do not believe unelected bureaucracies should be allowed to go down the road the NLRB is charting. The foundation of the NLRB complaint against Boeing would destroy the American business community’s ability to negotiate and make rational business decisions. Our legislation prohibits the use of statements made during negotiations – involving legitimate business concerns – to be used as a legal basis for a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. It is time for Congress to speak out in a common-sense way against the outrageous and frivolous complaint by unelected bureaucrats at the NLRB.” 

DeMint said: “Right to work states are winning the future for America's economy, yet this administration seems intent on stamping out this model of success. Right to work states have more business growth, more new jobs, and faster rising incomes than forced-unionism states. What the NLRB has done in the Boeing case is a threat to workers and businesses in every state. The NLRB is encouraging companies to take their jobs and investment overseas. This is a reprehensible act and an obvious kickback to union bosses the President is depending on helping his reelection. Unless we pass this bill, every worker and business in this nation is under the threat that if they don't do what union bosses want, this administration will come after you. Businesses have the right to invest in any state in America and states shouldn’t be penalized for protecting the rights of their citizens not to be forced to pay union dues. Right to work states should be applauded, not attacked, as they are attracting new investment and creating new jobs precisely because their policies encourage innovation and competition.” 

The bill would:

·         clarify that the NLRB would not be able to order an employer to relocate jobs from one location to another. 

·         guarantee an employer the right to decide where to do business within the United States.

·         protect an employer's free speech regarding the costs associated with having a unionized workforce without fear of such communication being used as evidence in an anti-union discrimination claim.