Alamogordo Public Schools & Child Nutrition

Alamogordo Public Schools celebrates National School Breakfast Week! School lunch and breakfast programs are a key part in the battle against food insecurity.

The cafeteria staff of the Alamogordo Public Schools is working hard to construct a nutritious breakfast for the system students. 

National School Breakfast Week (NSBW) celebrates the importance of a healthy school breakfast in fueling students for breakfast. 

APS is bringing fun breakfast festivities to Alamogordo’s elementary schools this week. They have decorated the lunch lines and will give out prizes to students who find a sticker on the bottom of their breakfast trays or food items. Prizes will be given out at the end of this week.

If you are interested in looking at the breakfast menus at the APS buildings for this week.

Why is school breakfast and school lunch programs important?

Each day, millions of students fuel their minds and bodies with the good nutrition provided by the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program.
There is considerable evidence of the effective role that participation in these programs plays in alleviating food insecurity and poverty, and in providing the nutrients students need for growth, development, learning, and overall health, especially for the nation’s most vulnerable children and adolescents. There are many benefits of the school meals programs…
School Meals Play a Critical Role in Student Health, Well-Being, and Academic Success
More than 14.6 million students eat a school breakfast and 29.7 million students eat a school lunch on a typical school day, based on data from the 2018–2019 school year.

The vast majority of these students are low-income and receive a free or reduced-price meals.

A considerable body of evidence shows that the school meals programs are profoundly important for students, especially low-income students, with well- documented benefits.

School Meals Alleviate Food Insecurity and PovertySchool meals are a critical component of the U.S. hunger safety net.
Multiple studies find improvements in food security through participation in the school meals programs. For example, school breakfast availability reduces low food security and very low food security among elementary school children.

For school lunch, participation is associated with a 14 percent reduction in the risk of food insufficiency among households with at least one child receiving a free or reduced-price school lunch.
Conversely, research shows that rates of food insecurity and food insufficiency among children are higher in the summer — a time when students do not have access to the school meal programs available during the academic year.

Nationally, school lunch also lifted 1.2 million people — including 722,000 children — above the poverty line in 2017, based on Census Bureau data on poverty and income in the U.S.

School Meals Support Good Nutrition. School  meals support good nutrition throughout the school day.

Program participants are less likely to have nutrient inadequacies and are more likely to consume fruits, vegetables, and milk at breakfast and lunch.

For school breakfast, similar dietary benefits are observed among students attending schools that provide breakfast at no cost or low cost to all students, when compared to students who eat away from school or through a traditional means-tested breakfast program.

For school lunch, researchers conclude “school lunches provide superior nutrient quality than lunches obtained from other sources, particularly for low-income children.” This is consistent with other studies comparing school lunches to packed lunches brought from home or elsewhere.

School meals programs are linked with improvements in the classroom. Students who participate in school breakfast
programs have improved attendance, behavior, academic performance, and academic achievement as well as
decreased tardiness, based on decades of research on the topic.

These effects also are observed when
implementing innovative models to increase breakfast participation. For example, providing students with breakfast
in the classroom is associated with lower rates of tardiness, fewer disciplinary office referrals, improved attendance
rates, and improved math and reading achievement test scores.

Improvements in student behavior have been observed with the Community Eligibility Provision as well: multiple out-of-school suspension rates fell by about 15
percent for elementary students and 6 percent for middle school students after implementation of community eligibility in one study.These reductions were even larger, at about 25 percent, for elementary school students in counties with high rates of food insecurity.

Finally, research demonstrates that
the impacts of program participation can be long-lasting. In a study examining
the effects of school lunch participation on adult outcomes, participation was associated with long-term educational attainment for men and women.

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