Make Your Case for School Breakfast
Make sure your school offers — and students take part in — a school breakfast program for better health and learning. This Play gets students involved in showing the need for school breakfast, and encourages students’ leadership and communications skills. Students gain support from school leaders, parents, teachers and other school staff — and measure changes before and after implementation.
How Does It Work?
- Improving Attendance, Health and Behavior: Moving School Breakfast Out of the Cafeteria. 2013. School Governance & Leadership. AASA, the School Superintendents Association.
- Starting the School Day Ready to Learn: A Position Statement. 2013. National Association of Elementary School Principals.
- Breakfast for Learning: Scientific research on the link between children’s nutrition and academic performance. 2011. Food Research and Action Center.
- Breakfast for Health: Scientific research on the link between children's nutrition and health. 2011. Food Research and Action Center.
Huddle Up
Make Your Case
Review the research information and the resources available in Tools and Resources. Talk with your school nutrition professionals to find out what breakfast choices your school already has and how many students participate. Ask about improvements that could be made and talk about it with your team.
Create a survey for students to find out what keeps them from eating a nutritious breakfast every day. Then take those results back to your school nutrition professionals and talk about where your information overlaps with their ideas.
Build Awareness
Get the word out: Meet with your team to plan school-wide activities and make posters, and create flyers to get the school board to start a breakfast-at-school program. Get the word out on your school’s website, blog or in your school’s eNewsletter.
- Consider creating an entertaining and informative video to highlight why school breakfast is a win-win for students, adults and the school.
- Ask your adult team members to help you arrange a presentation at a school board meeting.
- Invite supporters of Fuel Up to Play 60 to attend the meeting in support of your effort.
- At the meeting, emphasize your goals of promoting breakfast and its benefits to learning and long-term health. Explain how improving the breakfast choices at your school may lead to better grades, better attendance and long-term health and success for all students.
- Provide group members with handouts or flyers that share information about Fuel Up to Play 60 and the importance of daily breakfast consumption, using the Tools and Resources below.
Take Action
Get Started
Take your information to your principaland your school nutrition team to talk about starting a breakfast program outside the cafeteria.
If they are willing to try it out, your next step is to do the Breakfast for Everyone - First Meal Matters Play.
Spread the Word
Keep talking to people:
Get them on board to make a breakfast program part of your school’s (and district’s) long-term wellness plans.
Get Others Involved
- Create awareness materials like posters and announcements
- Provide supporters and key audiences with Fuel Up to Play 60 information
- Provide parents with information about the importance of breakfast
- Encourage parents to support breakfast at school
Tools That Can Help with this Play
Did You Know?
Less than half of students who qualify for school breakfast actually take advantage of it. Moving breakfast to the classroom allows all students to take advantage of a healthy start to the day, without any stigma and without impacting or diminishing learning time.
Make Your Case for School Breakfast
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