Obesity Debate Over Where to Serve School Breakfasts

The New York City Council plans to approve resolutions on Wednesday demanding Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration provides breakfast in the classroom at all city public schools, a policy the administration opposes because officials fear it could increase childhood obesity.

"We can't stand by, year after year, and be among the worst in the country in making sure our kids have access to nutritional food in the morning," said Council Member Stephen Levin, a Brooklyn Democrat and primary sponsor of the resolutions. "It's an injustice for our kids to go to school and sit throughout the school day hungry when they could be fed with federal dollars."

The council's Committee on Education voted 13-1 on Tuesday to approve the resolutions. One calls on the city Department of Education to provide classroom breakfasts. If the Bloomberg administration continues to balk, a second resolution urges the state Legislature to mandate the city offer the breakfasts. The full council is slated to vote on the resolutions Wednesday.

New York City, which runs the nation's largest public school system, currently offers free breakfast to all 1.1 million students, regardless of income, in school cafeterias. But advocates said the city would feed more hungry children if it provided breakfast in the classroom at the start of the school day, rather than merely making it available in the cafeteria.

Since 2008, city schools have been permitted to join a program that allows breakfast in the classroom. The program has expanded to 390 of the city's more than 1,700 schools, but only 67 of the schools currently participating have implemented the program in every classroom. While city officials said they are open to expanding the program further if principals request it, they are opposed to mandating it citywide because of fears it will increase obesity.

"We want to make sure that no child is hungry and every child has a healthy breakfast," said Lauren Passalacqua, a spokeswoman for the mayor. "At the same time obesity is epidemic nationwide, and 40% of the city's public school children are either overweight or obese, so we are appropriately concerned in making sure that our work to solve one problem doesn't inadvertently exacerbate the other."

Thomas Farley, commissioner of the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, testified at a council hearing earlier this year that he is concerned breakfast in the classroom is leading to some students eating two breakfasts.

A city study, which advocates of classroom breakfasts have called questionable, found children eating breakfast in the classroom consumed 90 more calories a day than those not in the program.

"We have a problem in obesity in children," Dr. Farley testified. "I am concerned that if we have breakfast in every classroom, that that could contribute to the problem and possibly make it worse."

Dr. Farley said many more children are suffering from severe health consequences related to obesity than problems from "not eating enough calories."

Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, an advocacy group, said breakfast in the classroom doesn't contribute to obesity, citing experts and research on this issue around the country.

But giving children a nutritional breakfast does increase educational performance, decreases absenteeism and reduces visits to the school nurse, he said. He called the Bloomberg administration stance on this issue "far outside the mainstream."

"Their response to New York's City's massive child hunger is taking away food from hungry children," Mr. Berg said.

A study of 26 large urban school districts nationwide from the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit dedicated to combating hunger, showed schools in Houston and the District of Columbia increased the number of low-income students eating breakfast the most dramatically in the 2010-11 school year. The key strategy was implementing breakfast in the classroom in nearly all elementary schools, the report said.

Among the 26 cities in the study, New York City was last in reaching low-income students with school breakfast.

Vincent Ignizio, a Staten Island Republican who voted in committee against the resolutions on Tuesday, said kids "ought to eat breakfast." But he said he was concerned about the unintended consequences of providing breakfast in the classroom, saying the policy could spark "serious" sanitation problems in the schools.

While Mr. Levin and advocates are hopeful the administration will reverse course on this issue or that the state Legislature will force the administration to provide breakfast in the classroom, they said it is very likely the policy won't change until a new mayor takes office in January 2014.

The top mayoral hopefuls—City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, former Comptroller Bill Thompson, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Comptroller John Liu and media executive Tom Allon—support breakfast in the classroom. Ms. Quinn has been among the most outspoken.

The council's resolutions "will provide our most vulnerable children with reliable access to a meal that will give them a healthy and nutritious start," Ms. Quinn said in an email.