How We Convinced One Superintendent to Change School Meals for Kids

A little boy eating breakfast at school

Making breakfast part of the school day works: when you serve breakfast in the classroom, a lot more kids start their day with a healthy meal.

But it's not always easy to convince educators. When Ariana Stillman, working for the No Kid Hungry campaign in Wisconsin last year, tried to get the superintendent to bring the program to students in the city of Cudahy, he turned her down.

"He had hesitations about interruptions to instructional time and mess," Stillman said. "We realized that it was going to take some convincing."

Cudahy is an industrial suburb of Milwaukee, and there are too many hungry kids there. Lots of parents work in factories or on the local military base, trying to feed their children on very low-wages. Food insecurity is as high as 80% in some neighborhoods.

"I met a father whose family is just above the threshold for free meals," Stillman said. "He had to call the school every morning and tell them not to feed his daughter breakfast because he couldn't afford it." 

So she started a grassroots campaign to let parents know that there was a better way to serve breakfast, and it got back to the superintendent, Dr. Jim Heiden. "Parents were coming to us and asking why the whole school wasn't getting free breakfast?" he remembered. 

school breakfast on a desk

Faced with this pressure, Dr. Heiden decided to try making breakfast part of the school day in two schools, just to see how it went. Working with our partners at the Milwaukee-based Hunger Task Force, No Kid Hungry helped the school district buy the equipment they needed and set up new breakfast programs.

The change was immediate. Kids were more focused, hallways were calmer, attendance was up. Dr. Heiden was convinced.

Today, every school in Cudahy serves breakfast during the school day.

"I'm amazed at the number of kids that go home to a house without food," said Dr. Heiden. "We have kids whose last good meal will be Friday at our school, and then they won't have a full meal again till they come back on Monday."

Today, Dr. Heiden is a champion for changing how schools serve breakfast. "We can't cure all the ills in this community, but serving breakfast is something we can do," he said.