Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that providing breakfast in schools through the National School Breakfast Program has a positive impact on classroom performance.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 210) expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that providing breakfast in schools through the National School Breakfast Program has a positive impact on classroom performance.

Mr. Speaker, I request 5 legislative days during which Members may revise and extend and insert extraneous material on H. Res. 210 into the Record.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H. Res. 210, a resolution expressing the sense of Congress that providing breakfast in school has a positive impact on classroom performance.

We all know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Good nutrition is an essential part of a child's ability to grow and to thrive. According to the Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition, hungry children have less energy for cognitive and social activities, which undermines their ability to learn.

The National School Breakfast Program was established as a pilot program by the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 and made permanent in 1975. The program was created to ensure that all low-income students start the school day with a nutritious breakfast and enter the classroom ready to learn.

Over the last five decades, Mr. Speaker, the National School Breakfast Program has continued to grow. It now operates in more than 85,000 public and nonprofit schools and residential care institutions nationwide. In 2007 over 10 million children participated in the National School Breakfast Program each and every day.

Feeding our children a nutritious breakfast is one of the most important ways we can ensure that students get the most out of their education. Eating close to the start of the school day has improved students' memory, problem-solving skills, and performance on standardized tests.

In addition to improving academic performance, Mr. Speaker, school breakfast programs have been shown to decrease absences, tardiness, and disciplinary problems among all students. In the State of Maryland, for example, referrals to the office decreased by 20 percent when classroom breakfast programs were implemented.

Children who eat a nutritious breakfast have better overall nutrition, maintain higher levels of important nutrients, and are less likely to be overweight than children who do not eat breakfast, combating child obesity, which is so important to our country. And in the past two decades, the number of overweight American children, Mr. Speaker, age 6 to 11 has actually doubled.

Making certain that children eat a healthy and nutritious breakfast is an important part of the effort to solve the public health crisis. Across the Nation millions of children go to school hungry every single day. Although 80 percent of institutions that operate a school lunch program also offer a school breakfast program, participation is much lower in the breakfast program. Only about one in three students who qualify for the free and reduced lunch program actually receive breakfast at school. Participation is low because of a variety of reasons, including inadequate time for an in-school meal and the stigma attached to eating breakfast at school.

Mr. Speaker, as a strong supporter of the school breakfast program, I've always believed that every child should be able to participate in program. I helped to establish a pilot program to test the benefits of a universal school breakfast program in six school districts, including Santa Rosa in my congressional district. And I strongly support providing breakfast for every child, regardless of need.

Providing nutritious breakfasts is a simple but important way to make sure students are more successful in school and helps to set them on the path toward a healthy lifestyle. By making breakfast more widely available, we would be able to share these educational, behavioral, and nutritional benefits with even more of our Nation's young people.

Mr. Speaker, once again I express my support for the National School Breakfast Program, and I thank my colleague Congresswoman Moore for introducing this important resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from Wisconsin, Gwen Moore.

(Ms. MOORE of Wisconsin asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania, Congresswoman Dahlkemper.

I would like to know if the gentleman from Kentucky has any further speakers?

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this resolution to recognize the important role the National School Breakfast Program plays in the education and health of our Nation's children.

I would like to say that it's obvious that if you eat a good breakfast you are much better prepared to learn, to focus, to behave yourself, even want to come to school, you want to be there on time. I can tell you from the breakfast pilot program that President Clinton signed into law that was my legislation, and the six districts around the country that had the program in effect for 3 years, it proved itself.

The administrators thought it was the best thing, the principals thought it was the best, the teachers and the kids loved it, and they were provided a balanced meal. I remember going to one of the schools in my district during the breakfast time, it was around 10:15 in the morning, they had been to their first classes and came out for this breakfast, all kids, not just poor. It had nothing to do with economic status.

There was a group of fifth and sixth graders sitting around the table, and I went over to talk to them and I said, what are you guys talking about? And they said, we're talking politics. I mean, they were having the best time. They were thinking. They were excited. Some of them ate two breakfasts every day because their parents actually fed them breakfast. That was the downside of the program was that all these kids didn't have to have breakfast, but we learned later that middle school and high school are the kids that really don't eat breakfast.

So we are going to be working and building on this program and ensuring that in the United States of America, the wealthiest country on the globe, we will, indeed, be able to feed all of our children so that they are the best learners this country can provide.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, H. Res. 210 seeks to express the sense of the House of Representatives that providing breakfast in schools through the National School Breakfast Program has a positive impact on classroom performance. I salute my colleague, Rep. Moore from Wisconsin, in her efforts to promote the National School Breakfast Program, and to recognize the positive impact that it has on our students. I urge my colleagues to support this important resolution.

It has often been said that the children are our future. As Members of Congress and adults, we must do all that we can to provide their well-being, safety, and excellence in school.

A former U.S. Surgeon General once articulated, ``This is expensive stupidity . . . trying to educate children with half starved bodies.'' While educators, parents and policymakers generally agree that children need breakfast in order to learn, function and grow, the nation still has a ways to go to insure that all needy and at-risk children receive a daily school breakfast. While nearly 100,000 individual schools across the country offer a school lunch, more than 15,000 of them still do not make breakfast available to children who are in need. In some states, only 50-60% of the schools serving students lunch also provide them with a breakfast to start the day.

We must endorse programs aimed to enhance the educational welfare of our children. As President Obama recently stated in his first address to a joint session of Congress, ``These education policies will open the doors of opportunity for our children. But it is up to us to ensure they walk through them.''

Beginning over twenty years ago, and continuing today, scholarly research has established that the School Breakfast Program significantly improves the cognitive abilities and learning capacities of children. Matched controlled studies, for example, indicate that low-income children who receive school breakfasts do significantly better on a variety of indicators than low-income peers who go without breakfasts. Notably, the better outcomes associated with school breakfast include both educational preparedness (attendance, energy, alertness, memory) and educational outcome measures (math scores, grades, reading ability).

When a child misses even one meal, let alone experiences chronic food shortages, impairments occur whether they are lethargy and inattention, tiredness and distraction, or actual physical symptoms such as stomachaches and headaches. The research from the United States Department of Agriculture shows that feeding children breakfast in school helps to prevent these adverse outcomes. Children getting breakfast at school also are sick less often, have fewer problems associated with hunger, such as dizziness, stomachaches and ear aches, and do significantly better than their peers who do not get a school breakfast in terms of cooperation, discipline and inter-personal behaviors.

Mr. Speaker, our failure to fully utilize the School Breakfast Program has substantial costs, costs that greatly reduce the return on educational investment in communities and states across the nation. Moreover, longer-term costs also are borne by young children who arrive at school unable to fully participate in the educational process due to lack of adequate nutrition.

We, as Members of Congress, cannot allow for a matter such as child hunger, which we as Congress can help eradicate, to act as an impediment to the education of our children. President Obama articulated very fittingly, that ``in a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity--it is a pre-requisite.''

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support H. Res. 210, expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that providing breakfast in schools through the National School Breakfast Program has a positive impact on classroom performance, because the School Breakfast Program represents a key way to protect these children and to get a better return on educational investments as well.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my strong support for the National School Breakfast Program, H. Res. 210.

This resolution really elucidates the importance of school breakfast programs and their positive impact on a child's overall academic performance. And, again, I want to thank the Education and Labor Committee for bringing this resolution forward in honor of National School Breakfast Week.

Mr. Speaker, every 35 seconds a child is born into poverty in the United States of America. In fact, as a Nation, we have seen an increase in children living in poverty up to nearly 3 million children, with children representing a disproportionate share of the poor in the United States, as they're 25 percent of the total population but 35 percent of the poor in our population.

And to the extent that the parents of children are responsible for their well-being, the unemployment rate, which has risen from 7.6 percent to 8.1 percent and just in the last month losing 651,000 jobs, 3.6 million jobs lost in the last year, this has caused families to struggle even more to feed their children, and they need to turn to schools for this much-needed assistance.

I can tell you that a study done by the Massachusetts General Hospital in conjunction with Harvard Medical School concluded that children who are at nutritional risk have significantly poorer attendance, punctuality, and grades. But it also showed that these same parents that are responsible for taking care of them self report that food insufficiency means that their children have repeated a grade in school, they have lower scores on standardized tests, lower grades in math, and more days tardy and absent from school.

Studies have also shown that students who fail to eat an adequate breakfast increase their chances for being overweight than children who eat a healthy breakfast on a daily basis.

Fortunately, Mr. Speaker, these data show that providing breakfast in school has been able to improve attentiveness and academic performance while reducing tardiness and disciplinary referrals.

I just want to mention that these school breakfasts must meet the nutritional standards under the dietary guidelines for Americans, which recommend no more than 30 percent of an individual's calories come from fat and less than 10 percent from saturated fat. In addition, breakfast must provide one-fourth of the recommended daily allowance for protein, calcium, iron, vitamin A, vitamin C, and calories. And I mention this because this might be the best meal the children have all day long.

I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, that providing availability, accessibility, and participation in the school breakfast program are some of the best ways to support the health and educational potential of children, particularly low-income children. In my own State of Wisconsin, we saw a significant increase in school breakfast participation with a 25.3 percent growth rate, and this is largely due to our efforts in our State to implement universal classroom breakfasts in most of our Milwaukee public elementary schools.

Let me conclude by saying this and reminding the body of this, Mr. Speaker, that though our country is in the midst of a tough economic time, no child in our community or across the country should ever go to school hungry. When our children are able to eat quality meals in the morning, we see improvements in math and reading scores as well as cognitive skills. If our children are going to be able to compete in a global environment, we need to do everything we can to make sure that they succeed. It's clear that there is a definite need for school breakfast programs right alongside our educational programs.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of House Resolution 210, expressing the sense of the House that providing breakfast in schools through the National School Breakfast Program has a positive impact on classroom performance.

Created as a pilot program in 1966 and made permanent in 1975, the National School Breakfast Program helps schools serve breakfast to ``nutritionally needy'' children. The program focuses on those schools where assistance is needed to provide adequate nutrition for students. In fiscal year 2007, over 10.1 million children participated in the school breakfast program each day. Of those, 8.1 million received their meals for free or at a reduced price. Participation has steadily grown over the years from only half a million children in 1970.

The School Breakfast Program is administered in nearly 84,000 schools and institutions by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service through State education agencies, in agreements with local school food authorities.

Public or nonprofit private schools serving grades K-12 and public or nonprofit private residential child care institutions may participate in the school breakfast program. School districts and independent schools that choose to take part in the breakfast program receive cash subsidies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for each meal they serve. In return, they must serve breakfasts that meet Federal requirements, and they must offer free or reduced-price breakfasts to eligible children.

Last week schools throughout the country celebrated National School Breakfast Week. During the week, school cafeterias nationwide encouraged students to begin their day with a healthful, nutritious school breakfast.

While many States that have implemented school breakfast programs have seen encouraging outcomes, the problem of childhood hunger persists. The Federal child nutrition programs are helping to end childhood hunger and promote nutrition and wellness, especially in terms of assisting those most in need of beneficial nutrition.

I stand in support of this resolution recognizing the importance of the National School Breakfast Program and the positive impact a nutritious breakfast can have on a child's ability to learn, grow, and develop to their fullest potential.

I ask for my colleagues' support.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of House Resolution 210, Recognizing the importance of the National School Lunch Program and commend my colleague, Rep. Gwen Moore for bringing this measure before the House.

This important program provides breakfast to over 8 million children through either free or reduced-price meals in approximately 16,000 schools. With the current economic crisis, working families are facing challenges they never expected. Last week, the Department of Labor announced the U.S. economy lost 651,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate hit 8.1 percent, its highest point in since 1983. These job losses make it even harder for some families to feed their children--so they turn to schools for help. We know that children who live in families that experience hunger have been shown to be more likely to have lower math scores, face an increased likelihood of repeating a grade, and receive more special education services.

We've learned over the years that making breakfast widely available through different venues, such as in the classroom, or as students exit their school bus, or outside the classroom, has been shown to diminish the stigma of receiving free or reduced-price breakfast, which often prevents eligible students from getting a traditional breakfast in school cafeterias.

Providing breakfast in the classroom can improve attentiveness and academic performance, while reducing tardiness and disciplinary referrals. Students who eat a complete breakfast have been shown to make fewer mistakes and work faster in math exercises than those who eat a partial breakfast. Students who skip breakfast are more likely to have difficulty distinguishing among similar images, show increased errors, and have slower memory recall. Studies have shown that access to nutritious programs such as the National School Lunch Program and National School Breakfast Program helps to create a strong learning environment for children and helps to improve children's concentration in the classroom.

Mr. Speaker, this is an incredibly important program with a well- documented track record of success. I'm pleased to add my voice of support for the National School Breakfast Program and I will be working with my colleagues to make sure that we provide the resources necessary to provide the benefits of this program to every hungry child who needs breakfast at school.