Nber Working Paper Series Expanding the School Breakfast Program: Impacts on Children's Consumption, Nutrition and Health

School meals programs are the front line of defense against childhood hunger, and while the school lunch program is nearly universally available in U.S. public schools, the school breakfast program has lagged behind in terms of availability and participation. In this paper we use experimental data collected by the USDA to measure the impact of two popular policy innovations aimed at increasing access to the school breakfast program. The first, universal free school breakfast, provides a hot breakfast before school (typically served in the school’s cafeteria) to all students regardless of their income eligibility for free or reduced-price meals. The second is the Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC) program that provides free school breakfast to all children to be eaten in the classroom during the first few minutes of the school day. We find both policies increase the take-up rate of school breakfast, though much of this reflects shifting breakfast consumption from home to school or consumption of multiple breakfasts and relatively little of the increase is from students gaining access to breakfast. We find little evidence of overall improvements in child 24-hour nutritional intake, health, behavior or achievement, with some evidence of health and behavior improvements among specific subpopulations. Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach School of Education and Social Policy Northwestern University Annenberg Hall, Room 205 2120 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208 and NBER [email protected] Mary Zaki Department of Economics Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208 [email protected] School meals programs are a front line of defense against childhood hunger, particularly for the 22.4 percent of children who live in households that experience food insecurity. While the school lunch program has long been nearly universally offered, availability of the school breakfast program (SBP) has lagged behind. There have been recent – and highly successful – attempts to expand access to the SBP. For example, between 1989 and 2000 the total number of breakfasts served doubled (McLaughlin et al. 2002). According to our calculations from NHANES data, as of 2009-10 almost three-quarters of children attend a school that offers the SBP, up from approximately half of students in the 1988-94 wave. A large research literature supports the commonly held notion that breakfast is an important meal. Children who skip breakfast have lower nutrient and energy intake across the day – in other words, they do not make up for the skipped meal by consuming more calories later in the day. Briefel et al. (1999) summarize the research evidence on cognitive impacts, and conclude “skipping breakfast interferes with cognition and learning, and that this effect is more pronounced in poorly nourished children.” Despite the importance of breakfast, only 86 percent of elementary school children aged, and 75 percent of children aged 12-19, consume any type of breakfast on a typical day (USDA ARS, 2010). Policy makers have long been troubled by the low take-up rate of the SBP, which was 26 percent in 2010 (compared with a 63 percent participation rate in the school lunch program, see Fox et al. 2013). This is in part troubling because there is evidence that school breakfast is nutritionally superior to breakfast at home (Bhattacharya et al. 2006; Devaney and Stuart 1998; Millimet et al. 2010). Two factors appear to drive the low take-up of breakfast: stigma and timing. Recent policy innovations have attempted to ameliorate these barriers to participation. To address (perceived) stigma associated with participation in the school breakfast program, some districts have offered universal free school breakfast instead of the standard program that provides free breakfast only to students who are income-eligible for a subsidy. There is some evidence, described below, that this policy change increases take-up rates. The limitation remains, however, that in order to participate in the breakfast program a student generally has to arrive at school prior to the start of classes and this is reported to be an important barrier for some children. To address this, another recent policy innovation has 1 The USDA has special reimbursement provisions that encourage schools to adopt universal free meals programs.