Even more basically, however, their unpreparedness is about not getting enough nutrition and sleep. Among “factors strongly associated with school readiness” the report states that whether a child comes to school “hungry, tired or ill” was twice as important as the next most important factor.
That hunger is such a big issue would seem strange except for the line of people visible at the food pantry on 36th Street and San Pablo Avenue or at the St. Vincent de Paul’s midday meal.
On a recent afternoon, 5-year-old Abria and her sister Asha were in line with their mother Regina. Their mother makes sure her girls get three meals a day, but since they have no kitchen in the shelter where they live, it is a huge strategic effort involving traveling around the city and spending hours in lines or walking.
“The Lord provides, so we can’t complain,” Regina said.
Over on San Pablo Avenue and 36th Street, the line goes 77 people deep as another soon-to-be kindergartener, Vanessa, and her mother, Ronnie, wait for their turn to get free groceries. It’s a long wait that will take all of that afternoon.
“For breakfast, we have food from WIC (The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children),” Ronnie explains, and her children can get lunch at school. But summer is more challenging.
Bright-eyed and clearly athletic as she does acrobatics from the line, Abria is not hungry. But what if her mother were not willing to make such efforts? According to teachers, some parents are not.
Teacher Emma Coufal, who has been teaching kindergarten at Allendale Elementary in Oakland for the last three years, said that she sees these problems every day.
“We have a lot of students who come to school too tired,” Coufal said. “We just have to let them sleep or they won’t function. They sleep at their desk or on a beanbag chair in library.”
Other kids are malnourished, a first-world form of hunger.
“A lot of our kids eat poor food, like spicy chips and candy. It is hard to focus on learning when coming down from a sugar high,” Coufal said.
One of her students was found to have a high lead content in his blood from something he was eating.
Allendale serves both breakfast and lunch to all its students. But if students arrive at school too late for breakfast, they are also typically unfed, and listless or restless.
That hunger is an issue is not lost on the school district. Food programs have become a significant operation of the Oakland Unified School District, which serves 21,500 lunches, 8,500 breakfasts, 8,400 snacks and 500 dinners every day to its students.
Recognizing the influence of hunger and nutrition, and how breakfast influences a child’s day, it serves breakfast at 75 of it 86 schools. It organizes fruit and vegetable farmers' markets at 22 school sites and has launched a farm-to-school program, and so most of its produce is farmed in Northern California.
Once children are old enough to attend school regularly, they may have more regular access to nutritious food.
Jennifer LeBarre, OUSD director of nutrition services, is well aware of the role hunger and nutrition play in academic success. To make the point, she asks adults if they’ve ever had to get through a workday without eating –- or even had to show up at a morning meeting without breakfast -- and to think about how unfocused and irritable most people are in such situations.
Read the full Oakland Achieves report here.
This story originally appeared on KQED News Associate site Oakland Local.
