Panel Paper: Expanding the School Breakfast Program: Impacts On Children's Consumption, Nutrition and Health

Thursday, November 7, 2013 : 10:25 AM
Washington (Ritz Carlton)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Mary Zaki, Northwestern University
School meals programs are the front line of defense against childhood hunger. While the school lunch program is nearly universally available in U.S. public schools, there have been recent attempts to expand availability and takeup of the school breakfast program. We use experimental data to measure the impact of two popular policy innovations. The first, universal free school breakfast, provides a hot breakfast before school (typically served in the 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. Both policies substantially increase the likelihood that a student eats a school breakfast. This impact is mostly driven, however, by students substituting eating breakfast at home in favor of eating breakfast at school. The programs do not improve the likelihood of eating any breakfast, though the BIC program substantially increases the likelihood of eating two daily breakfasts. We measure the impact of both breakfast expansion programs on nutrient intake, and health and academic outcomes. We also estimate the relative impact of BIC vs. making the traditional breakfast program universally free.