When a teen was shot to death in the halls of a Toronto high school in 2007, it sparked a hunger among educators in the troubled neighbourhood for new ways to stem violence and offer a better future to their students.
Instead of putting in metal detectors in the area’s schools, they came up with a unique, softer approach to reducing aggression and improving concentration in the classroom: food.
“The administrators wanted a nutrition program – they wanted to make sure every kid was fed,” said Mena Paternostro, co-ordinator of student nutrition with the Toronto District School Board. “They came out loud and clear and told us a hungry kid was an angry kid.”
After some creative fundraising by the Toronto Foundation for Student Success, the school board’s charitable arm, a universal morning meal pilot program was implemented at seven schools – three high schools and four primary schools that feed into them. Now, three years later, there are strong signs that the principals were right: Not only do satiated students exhibit less aggression, they attend more classes, get fewer suspensions and receive higher grades, according to interim calculations by the TDSB.
The results of the initiative, called Feeding Our Future, surprised even the administrators who lobbied for the program on a hunch, and are fuelling hopes the pilot will inspire others like it across the country. Correlations between academic achievement and school meal consumption in developed countries have rarely been proved. (Much of the research on school feeding has focused on combatting malnutrition in developing countries.)
“I was blown away,” said Monday Gala, a former vice-principal at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute, the high school in Toronto’s gritty Jane-Finch corridor where Jordan Manners was killed in 2007. Mr. Gala is now vice-principal at Emery Collegiate Institute. “I was keeping my fingers crossed that the data would show some kind of correlation,” he said.
By correlating student surveys that tracked eating habits at home and at school with test scores, school board researchers have concluded that middle-school students who eat some food each morning score higher in math and science. (Forty-four per cent of students who did not eat were deemed academically at risk versus 28 per cent who did.)
At the high-school level, students who eat before or at school were more likely to graduate than their hungry counterparts. At the time the information was collected, 78 per cent of Grade 10 students who reported eating morning meals most days were on track to complete their diploma (meaning they earned 15 or more credits) versus 61 per cent who went without food.
If the board is ultimately able to show that the program increases graduation rates, their study will have significant implications for Canada’s economy and be a boost to those who argue school meal programs ought to be viewed as an investment, not a cost.
In a previous analysis, the Boston Consulting Group suggested that on average, each high-school graduate contributes an extra $75,000 to the economy. Grads earn higher salaries than dropouts, pay increased tax revenue, log lower health-care costs, are less reliant on social assistance and are more likely to have children who also graduate from high school.
If providing food at school increases graduation rates by just 3 per cent, based on the BCG figures, a national school meals program implemented in Canada’s high schools at a cost of $1.25 a day would result in a net payback of more than $500-million to government coffers. If the graduation rate increased by 5 per cent but the cost of meals remained the same, the payback would be more than $1-billion.
