Bret Lamoureau, 5, a kindergartner at the Leo Savoie School in Woonsocket, reaches for some orange juice during the breakfast program at the school yesterday. Behind him is his brother Brandon, 7. State financing for the program is in jeopardy. The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

WOONSOCKET — By 8:45 a.m., the maple syrup was flowing and cafeteria tables were as full as the students’ mouths.

The daily breakfast program at Leo Savoie Elementary School was in full swing.

But a proposal to eliminate the state’s share of financing for school breakfast has educators worried about the future of this and other breakfast programs that they say help improve focus and academic performance in schools across the state.

The bulk of Rhode Island’s $6-million breakfast program, including the cost of food, is paid for by the federal government and will remain untouched. The state contributes just $600,000 annually.

Yet educators call that money the critical piece of the breakfast pie — the one that defrays administrative costs, including the cost of hiring servers needed to effectively run the programs and encourage greater participation.

“Obviously it is going to have a serious impact,” said Thomas Conlon, business administrator for the Pawtucket schools.

Jeff Neal, spokesman for Governor Carcieri, said the size of the state budget crisis “has made continuing that state subsidy for cities and towns very difficult.”

The Savoie students who licked cream cheese off their fingers yesterday knew nothing of the problems. They’re grateful for the breakfast program for the obvious reasons: they like pancakes and OJ and don’t like the sick feeling they get in math class when they haven’t eaten.

“If I don’t eat, I get a headache and I don’t have enough energy to do anything,” 10-year-old Cassaundra Trudel reported.

For Principal Karen MacBeth, the program relieves another kind of headache in an urban school. “If you have a child that goes to class fed and ready to learn, it’s one less obstacle,” she said.

School administrators yesterday said it’s hard to quantify what will happen to Rhode Island’s breakfast programs should the General Assembly approve the cuts. In most districts, state money accounts for between 11 and 13 percent of the overall breakfast budget with per-meal reimbursements totaling about 16 cents each. Eliminating state money in Providence would amount to a $256,000 reduction, in Barrington, just $1,500.

“Is that a killer for them? That’s the question we can’t answer,” Department of Education spokesman Elliot Krieger said.

Districts will still receive reimbursements as high as $1.61 per meal for qualifying children in the poorest districts and $1.35 for eligible students elsewhere, according to the department.

But without administrative money, it’s difficult to hire staff and organize the program enough to persuade children to participate.

“The proposed elimination of state funds for the school breakfast program is likely to reduce the number of breakfasts served to low-income children…” said Catherine B. Walsh, deputy director of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT.

Even the Board of Regents, which first proposed the cuts, noted that the state’s contribution helps “promote and encourage more students to participate in breakfast,” which the board describes as the most important meal of the day.

Krieger said the regents did not endorse eliminating financing, but were told they needed to submit a spending plan that met the governor’s budget target for that department.

The biggest impact may fall to the cities and towns that offer universal breakfast, where all students eat for free regardless of their family’s income. Providence, Cranston, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Woonsocket all offer the program district wide with East Providence, Warwick and South Kingstown offering it at some schools.

Popularized in recent years, universal programs were designed to reduce stigma and offer meals to children who might not be eating for reasons other than poverty. The Washington, D.C.-based Food Research & Action Center has cited the universal program as contributing to 8.1 million breakfasts served to low-income children last year.

To succeed, however, those programs need low-income participants and state money to help offset the cost of feeding children who don’t qualify for the subsidies.

Pawtucket’s Conlon said those districts might now be faced with the choice of eliminating the universal program or raising lunch prices.

Carcieri’s spokesman said he believes “that school districts will be able to pay these administrative costs so that children in their communities will continue to receive this federally funded benefit.”

But educators say the proposed cuts, combined with the governor’s plan to level fund school districts for the second year in a row and the effects of a new law that caps the amount of money communities can levy in taxes means there isn’t much money left to dig into.

Representatives from the Campaign to Eliminate Childhood Poverty who gathered outside the governor’s office to protest the plan yesterday wondered aloud how the governor — who has repeated his commitment to bettering education in Rhode Island — could cut a program with such obvious academic benefits.

School leaders shared those questions.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, [the state funding] isn’t a lot of money,” said Woonsocket Supt. Maureen B. Macera, “but it confounds me. I don’t understand the priorities.”

cneedham@projo.com