For Patty Eager, the back-to-school season means a return to her typical breakfast routine: preparing hundreds of snacks.

Every weekday for the next eight months, Patty Eager will feed 155 children as part of the nutrition program at William Burgess Elementary School.

“It’s served during opening exercises at school,” she explains. “So it doesn’t interfere with the school time.” Interference this is not: Eager’s treats, which consist of healthy choices from at least three food groups, help the students focus and learn.

The snacks are part of the Toronto Partners for Student Nutrition’s Student Nutrition Program (SNP), which exists separately from cafeteria lunch systems and is designed to offer Toronto students healthy breakfasts, morning meals, snacks or lunches. In Toronto schools, there are approximately 720 programs like Eager’s, feeding more than 140,000 children on a daily basis.

Examples of these initiatives have been around since WWII, when teachers started to realize children were coming to school with empty stomachs. “They couldn’t learn if they were hungry,” explains Ulla Knowles, Student Nutrition Community Development Manager for FoodShare, one of the SNP’s key partners. In its current incarnation, the SNP has been around since the early nineties and is funded by the City of Toronto, the province of Ontario and private donations.

Eager has been involved with William Burgess’ snack program since its inception in 2009. When an opportunity came up to start a nutrition program at her children’s school, she took it. “I’d been looking for some meaningful way to volunteer in the school,” says the former insurance broker. Now a stay-at-home mom, she runs the program with the help of her nine-year-old son, Matthew.

Alexandra Jones is the school teacher who first brought the snack program to William Burgess. She got involved with SNP seven years ago, when teaching grades six, seven and eight at C.R. Marchant Middle School.

Jones explains that in the school’s Rexdale neighbourhood, access to healthy food was difficult, an issue with noticeable consequences. “When they came in they were reasonably sized 11-year-olds,” recalls Jones. “And when they left they were, for the most part, overweight teenagers.”

She started the snack program and created a fruit stand. In its first two days, a week's worth of fruits and veggies sold out. The healthy food was in such high demand that three trips to the grocery store were made that week.

Teachers quickly noticed a difference in the kids’ attitude and performances, results echoed at SNP initiatives across the city. Six weeks into the snack program at William Burgess, the principal told Eager he had noticed a significant reduction in the amount of children misbehaving: “It just dropped off dramatically.”

But the program does come with its share of challenges, and most notable is the issue of stigma. “Kids who are disadvantaged don’t want to be labelled as poor in another manner,” Knowles says. She emphasizes that hunger can be completely unrelated to socio-economic status. “You don’t know what’s not in their stomachs or what kind of food that they’re existing on,” she says, explaining that some middle-class parents are simply too busy to devote time to good nutrition. Some parents simply refuse to participate, offended with what they perceive as the suggestion they are not feeding their children. With this in mind, the programs are designed to
be inclusive: once they are put in place, all children have access to the food.

Another hurdle is the issue of funding, which is now up for review at the municipal level. The city currently donates $3.8 million to the SNP annually, roughly 10 per cent of the amount required to finance the growing initiative. If this money is pulled, Knowles anticipates a number of schools would no longer be able to run their programs. “It’s kind of a scary prospect.”

Eager believes this will be an easy sell. To anyone who may be sceptical of the program, she extends an invitation. “Spend the week with me or at any meal program, see how happy the kids are.”