TURNERS FALLS — Gregory Browne, 4, was busy eating his Cocoa Puffs cereal Monday morning. So focused on his breakfast, in fact, that he barely stopped to chat with a visiting Congressman.
So Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., dressed in a dark gray suit with no tie, got to chat instead with the boy’s grandmother, Melissa Wright, as part of his tour of the Unity Park free breakfast site, along with an Orange-Athol meals program breakfast site at Athol High School earlier and others around his district.
McGovern’s third annual “Summer Food Rocks Tour 2016” is meant to call attention to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program, which feeds up to 75 youths up at three Gill-Montague Regional School District sites, according to the district’s food service director, Mistelle Hannah.
Hannah, who grew up in Chicopee in a needy family where she was sent to the park to get the only breakfast she would have received, said more kids come out for free lunches — enhanced on alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays with fresh local blueberries.
“The kids who come and get it are kids who need it,” she emphasized.
“It’s hard in the summer,” Wright tells McGovern as Gregory munches on his cereal. “I go to work, he comes here. We don’t have time in the morning to get everybody, and certainly to get everybody a healthy breakfast.”
Sandra Huber tells the same thing to McGovern as her 2-year-old granddaughter, Bella, eats her cereal at a nearby picnic table. “It’s fantastic. I’m a grammy and I take care of the three little ones, off and on, during the week so their parents can work. This is great for us. We can walk here. We come for breakfast, and a lot of times for lunch.”
When McGovern, the ranking member of the House Committee on Agriculture’s nutrition subcommittee, tells the woman, who’s also brought her 5- and 6-year-old grandsons along, “These are important programs. We’ve got some in Congress trying to cut them,” she tells him, “That’s crazy. I tell people you can bring your kids over to the park. A balanced meal — this is what I love.”
“Summertime is the time a child in the U.S. is most likely to go hungry,” says Kevin W. Concannon, USDA undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services. Last year, Massachusetts served almost 3 million meals at more than 1,000 sites like this one — and the Athol High School site where 80 young people were being served breakfast earlier in the morning.
The Orange-Athol program, with 10 sites, up from six last year, serves a population where 89 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price school meals. The Montague program, with five sites — up from four last year — serves a community where 59 percent of students qualify, according to the Massachusetts Elementary and Secondary Outreach Program.
McGovern said federal re-authorization of the Health Hunger Free Kids Act 2010, as proposed by Republicans in Congress, “would undercut not only the summer feeding program but also damage the program during the school year as well” by converting it to a Block Grant program that would allow many states to divert it to other uses, by doing away with categorical eligibility that allows it to everyone in high-poverty areas, and by lowering nutritional standards and cutting funding.
The House bill, which was reported favorably out of committee, “is a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible re-authorization. I’d rather us do nothing and let it continue this year, so it doesn’t undermine or undercut the program. Maybe with a different Congress, we might have a discussion about how we might expand the program,” as he said it has expanded under the Obama administration.
“Getting access to nutritious breakfasts and lunches year-round is important to (young people’s) development, to learn and to be healthy, and to grow up to be productive, successful adults. It’s a wise investment of taxpayer dollars. They claim it would be saving us money. I’d argue that would cost us more money, if kids don’t have access to nutritious food, then they can’t concentrate, they don’t learn in school, and then there are other challenges down the road.”
On the Web: www.meals4kids.org/find-summer-meal-site