March 8-12, 2021 is National School Breakfast Week, an annual opportunity to celebrate Virginia’s incredible school nutrition staff and their commitment to ensuring that all students start their day ready to learn.
Here in Virginia, we know that school breakfast is a beautiful part of the school day: research has proven that the implementation of school breakfast can increase a student’s attendance, test scores, and overall health. By 2020, over 1,300 Virginia schools had launched Breakfast After the Bell programs to make school breakfast even more accessible to students.
March also marks one year since the pandemic outbreak saw schools across Virginia shift to virtual learning, requiring nutrition departments to pivot overnight to serve meals in safe and innovative ways. Although school breakfast may look different during the 2020-2021 school year, nutrition teams across the Commonwealth continue to serve meals to children and teens. This includes delivering meals door-to-door and/or along bus routes, offering curbside pickup (rain or shine!), and serving meals in the classroom when students are learning in-person. We encourage you to use NSBW as a way to highlight your local Hunger Heroes, who have risked their own health and safety to make certain that students have the fuel they need to succeed, wherever they are learning this year.
This year’s NSBW theme is “Scoring Big with School Breakfast.” The School Nutrition Association developed a toolkit for NSBW to illustrate a variety of strategies to engage and educate about the importance of school breakfast. The toolkit includes ideas on leveraging menus, ways to engage parents and the media (within COVID-19 safety protocols), sample motivational messages from respected champions, and much more.
This National School Breakfast Week and every week, No Kid Hungry Virginia gives thanks to Virginia’s nutrition teams who work nonstop to nourish our students.
More Resources
Learn More About School Breakfast
No Kid Hungry is working to connect every kid with school breakfast every day in communities across the U.S. See how breakfast is making a difference at NoKidHungry.org/Breakfast
Join Team No Kid Hungry
You can help surround kids with healthy food where they live, learn and play. Pledge to make No Kid Hungry a reality at NoKidHungry.org
Learn What Is Working with School Breakfast
The No Kid Hungry Center for Best Practices offers a wide variety of information about the school breakfast program and how participation is being increased across the country. Learn more at NoKidHungry.org/BestPractices
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1] The Connections Between Food Insecurity, the Federal Nutrition Programs, and Student Behavior. Food Research & Action Center and National (FRAC). 2018. frac.org/wp-content/uploads/breakfast-for-behavior.pdf.