By Nancy Knickerbocker, BCTF staff
In normal times, Kamloops teacher Val Shannik always got to school in time to have breakfast ready for students arriving on the 7:45 a.m. bus to Brock Middle School. Normally, about 200 kids relied on that cereal, oatmeal, or toast with peanut butter and jam to start their day. That is, until the pandemic hit.
“It was a vital part of their daily nutrition, but now we can’t run the program with the safety measures we need in place for COVID,” says Shannik. “It’s breaking my heart…. You see some kids with new cell phones, new clothes. And then you see other kids who don’t know where their next meal is coming from.”
A recent assessment by UNICEF Canada of the pandemic’s impact on children states, “More children will face poverty and food insecurity as prolonged job losses and debt take their toll on family finances and some children lose the school meals they relied on. Canada is the only G-8 country without a guaranteed meal at school every day.”
In the 2019 federal budget, Ottawa announced its intention to work toward a national school food program, but there was no funding attached to the pledge. Without a co-ordinated strategy, hungry students must depend on a fragile patchwork of initiatives. For example, the Brock breakfast program relied on free bread from a local bakery, help from a nearby church, and donations from school staff and community members who made it work for everyone. “It’s open to all because we want to take away the stigma of being identified as struggling,” Shannik said.
Universal access is key to ensuring equity and eliminating stigma, says Dr. Claire Tugault-Lafleur, a post-doctoral fellow in the UBC School of Population and Public Health. “Making sure all kids are fed well so they can learn well is one of their basic human rights,” she said, pointing to Japan and Sweden as successful models of universally accessible healthy school food programs. In her recent study “Who’s missing lunch in Canada?” Tugault-Lafleur investigates a myriad of demographic, socio-economic, and lifestyle factors associated with children’s odds of missing lunch on school days.
Of course, missed meals have profound implications for learning. “You can’t begin to do academics until you’ve got the kids there with food in their stomachs, feeling safe,” Shannik says. “Often they’re unable to process their emotions because of the hunger and things going on at home.”
By contrast, shared meals foster connections. “Breaking bread together leads to deeper conversations,” says Nicola Cridge, a youth worker at Pinetree Secondary in Coquitlam. “The pandemic has exposed so many needs. Parents have lost their jobs, kids are stressed.”
In September, the BC Centre for Disease Control and BC Children’s Hospital reported, “When in-person instruction was suspended, the BC Ministry of Education advised school districts to continue providing meal programs; 75,000 meals were delivered to 16,000 families every week. Anecdotal information suggests that the number of families seeking support from school food programming increased considerably during this time.”
This increase will come as no surprise to BC teachers, who have long been filling the gap between students’ needs and provincial funding. In the BCTF’s most recent study on poverty in education (2015), four out of five respondents had students who started the school day hungry, yet only 43% of schools offered breakfast or lunch programs. In countless kind gestures, teachers spent $3.85 million per year out of their own pockets to help feed hungry kids. It’s likely that figure has also increased in the current crisis.
Clearly, the goodwill of individual teachers cannot provide a sustainable solution to the pervasive food insecurity experienced by BC students. What’s needed is a comprehensive poverty reduction plan, including a fully funded, universally accessible school food program.