ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : Working Poor: New Face of Hunger : Children are often left on their own in the morning. Breakfast programs keep them fed and alert in class.

There are hungry children in Orange County. That is a reality that is frequently obscuredby the County’s affluence. As a board member for HOPE, a homeless outreach program, I see needy families living in parks and shelters. As an educator for nearly 30 years in the Santa Ana Unified School District, I see a different face of hunger, but one with a similar impact onthe lives and educations of young people. Today, the working poor and many of their children are hungry.

In the early years of my teaching career, I rarely saw children coming to school hungry. People owned their own homes; mothers stayed home, and children were fed breakfast before coming to school. It was a good group of students.

In the late ‘60s I was assistant principal in a neighborhood dotted with apartment complexes. Parents changed jobs frequently and sometimes had to move in the middle of the night to avoid bills that had piled up. It was here that I saw children going to the nurse complaining of stomachaches, nausea and headaches. They were inattentive in class, and we found the cause in many cases was that they had come to school with no breakfast. If they had eaten dinner at 6 p.m. the previous night, they had been without food for at least 14 hours. When that happens, blood sugar dips and the body slows down. Children are not going to be prepared to learn.

In the early ‘70s, the national economic downturn and changing demographics in Santa Ana added to the causes of children coming to school hungry. More of our families had two working parents trying to eke out a living at low-paying jobs. Frequently they left the house early to get to work and children were left on their own for breakfast. If there was food in the house, children often did not know how to prepare it--or simply did not have time. I encountered several fifth- and sixth-grade students who were responsible for bathing, feeding and dressing their younger brothers and sisters for school. In those families, not everyone managed to get to school with a full stomach.

Teachers have always been aware of hungry children. They are inattentive; they may have their heads down on their desks; they are tired. They are not ready to learn. Many teachers kept crackers in their desks to provide snacks for little ones who were hungry. When I was principal at Roosevelt Elementary School in 1970, we started our own informal free-lunch program. We sold ice cream bars at the lunch period for the upper-grade children. With those profits, we ran like crazy to a nearby dairy and quickly bought cartons of milk. We gave the milk and some peanut butter and crackers we had bought to the younger children who had no lunches.

For a couple of years in the early ‘70s, the Santa Ana school district had a free and reduced-price breakfast program to help the city’s children and their educations. Last year we once again began phasing in a breakfast program in addition to the lunch program that has been in place for years.

At schools with the breakfast program, children tend to be more punctual (so they will be on time for breakfast); there are fewer with their heads down or napping, and there are more children who are alert and ready to learn. Through these programs, which are fully funded by federal dollars, we can provide two balanced meals a day to children who might otherwise eat only once a day.

In Santa Ana, most families have a place to live because two and three families may share a home as a way to stretch their meager incomes. But poverty inevitably brings hunger and undernutrition, which has a direct impact on a youngster’s ability or willingness to learn. We see too many children living on the edge of malnutrition. Programs for the hungry must include--not exclude--more of these children of Orange County’s working poor.