Nearly 8 million students a year are considered “chronically absent,” meaning they miss at least three weeks of school per year. Educators around the nation are focused on finding ways to reduce this number. Many schools, however, already have an effective, powerful tool at their disposal – school breakfast. A new study conducted on behalf of No Kid Hungry by researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara finds that serving school breakfast after the bell as a part of the school day has the potential to significantly reduce chronic absenteeism.
Among the findings:
- Serving breakfast as part of the school day can reduce chronic absenteeism by an average of 6 percentage points.
- For context, holding all other factors constant, a school where 22% of students are chronically absent (the average in the schools studied) could potentially see that drop to 16% after implementing Breakfast After the Bell.
- And while the focus of the study was absenteeism, exploratory analysis also found that Breakfast After the Bell led to improvements in reading achievement and “internalizing behaviors,” such as anxiety, loneliness, and sadness among students.
This study shows that serving breakfast as part of the school day has an effect comparable to other evidence-based interventions that have an impact on chronic absenteeism. As such, while school breakfast is often viewed as something separate from school performance, these findings reinforce that it is intertwined with student success. For more information, please contact Erica Olmstead (eolmstead@strength.org).