The board says it needs more information on instituting a pilot universal free breakfast program at three elementary schools.

01:00 AM EST on Thursday, December 9, 2004

By CYNTHIA NEEDHAM
Journal Staff Writer

WOONSOCKET -- The School Committee hasn't cleared the breakfast table, but neither have its members dug in to the idea of universal free breakfast.

For the second time this semester the committee voted to table a pilot program that would serve free breakfast to all students in three of the city's most underserved schools -- Kevin Coleman, Fifth Avenue and Second Avenue Elementary Echools.

In a sometimes heated debated with representatives from the Campaign to Eliminate Childhood Poverty, all five committee members were frank about their concerns, which ranged from moral and political to nutritional.

"What you are asking for is a conversion to socialism," member John F. Ward unequivocally told the anti-hunger advocates. Not only would the program mean giving freebies to those who could otherwise afford their own meals, Ward said, it would mean pumping children full of less than nutritious foods like the now infamous "super doughnut," a popular item on school breakfast menus.

For member Alan L. Auclair, the objections were more personal. Auclair spoke of his own family's financial troubles and said the school district should not take on the role of parents.

"What we're saying here is you don't need to be responsible for your child. I understand it's hard. I'm a single parent taking care of a 10-year-old, but you do what you have to do," he said.

Free breakfast supporters shot back that it shouldn't matter why a child isn't eating breakfast. If he's hungry, he deserves to be fed.

"There are children who are not eating," Linda Bouley, a fourth-grade teacher at Citizens Memorial Elementary School said of her own students. "I don't know what's in their cupboard and I don't know how mom gets to work, it's not my business, but some of these children are not eating." It's a reality that she says debilitates student performance.

At nearly every school in the district, more than 50 percent of the children qualify for free or reduced-price meals, with some averages hovering above 80 percent, according to state Department of Education statistics from last year. Legally, each school already offers breakfast to such students, but advocates say the program can only be effective if done universally.

If everyone is allowed to eat, they say, stigmas evaporate and children come to class ready to learn. And since federal monies fully reimburse the program, it's a win-win situation, they say.

But even those School Committee members that seemed sympathetic to the universal idea took issue with the pilot plan, insisting that shifting the program to schools in the city's more affluent neighborhoods, where stigmas may be more prevalent, would be a better litmus test. "I couldn't see a school with a 96-percent eligibility [for free or reduced-price meals] getting stigmatized by 4 percent of the school," the committee chairman, Marc A. Dubois, said.

For a time it seemed as though every member found problems with the pilot and defeat loomed large. But a last-minute motion by Auclair tabled the vote until the committee is able to cull more extensive information and make a more informed decision. In a 3-to-2 vote, Auclair, Michelle R. Williams and Michael R. Bileau all voted to table the motion.