New Mexico Appleseed Launches Campaign to Promote Breakfast for Every School Child

New Mexico Appleseed, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that crafts and advocates for high impact policy solutions that impact poor and underserved residents of our state, recently launched its Breakfast After the Bell campaign to promote efforts to ensure that every school in our state offers breakfasts to its students.  The organization is part of a national network of 17 Appleseed centers in the U.S.

Here are a couple of paragraphs about the campaign:

When we talk about the “education gap” New Mexico’s children struggle to close, poverty is the common denominator most of our children share. With poverty comes malnutrition, undernutrition and even hunger. While we cannot control the chaos in children’s lives caused by being poor, there is one thing we can control: ensuring children who need it can eat up to three meals per day five days per week at their school.

Breakfast is the most important of these meals, because children who eat it do far better in school than those who do not. And we know, with so many families struggling to make ends meet, that many children come to school without having eaten breakfast. With the new breakfast law passed in the 2011 New Mexico legislature, schools can now ensure that every child in their school gets the solid nutrition provided by breakfast every single morning by serving it during the first few minutes of class. There are three main evidence-based reasons that New Mexico schools should offer breakfast to their students during the first few minutes of class, after the school day begins.

Read the Breakfast After the Bell report (31 pages)   

And below is a great 9-minute video.