Access to Healthy Food Improves Student Success

Our approach to education is to focus on all areas that contribute to a student’s academic success and the availability to nutritious food is a big part of that focus. All of our MAS students eat for free each day—breakfast, lunch, and an after-school meal if students participate in our after-school program. Additionally, our elementary students receive a daily afternoon snack, all free of charge. MAS also works with the Roadrunner Food Bank to provide healthy foods to families once a month.

Why do we commit to many resources to help our students get access to healthy food? A USDA study revealed that over 80 percent of households with very low food security report cutting the size and frequency of meals or skipping meals altogether, contributing to being a major source of stress for children. Food security is fundamental to a child’s ability to succeed in school. Because students spend much of their time at school, school provides an opportunity for them to receive at least two meals a day get much of their physical activity at school.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and the American Youth Policy Forum, the amount, availability, and quality of food all affect children’s physical and mental health, as well as their brain development. These impacts are numerous, including:

• Healthy students are better on all levels of academic achievement: academic performance, education behavior, and cognitive skills and attitudes. Children who grow up in food insecure households often lag behind their food-secure peers in terms of cognitive, emotional, and physical development.
• Research indicates that food-insecure children are almost twice as likely to be in fair or poor health when compared to food-secure children and are significantly more likely to be hospitalized.
• Mental health challenges such as depression, anxiety, and behavioral problems among children increase as food insecurity increases. By the time they are teenagers, food-insecure children are twice as likely as their peers to have seen a psychologist or to have been suspended.
• Children from homes with persistent food insecurity have shown smaller gains in both reading and math than their food-secure counterparts and food insecurity has been shown to reduce a child’s chances of graduating from high school.
• Investing in the health of students contributes to healthy communities in the future Research shows that workers who experienced hunger as children are not as well prepared physically, mentally, emotionally or socially to perform effectively in the contemporary workforce.

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