When school’s out, hunger often begins
Burlington Free Press
11:30 PM, Jun. 9, 2011
SOUTH BURLINGTON — How can it be that hunger pangs routinely eclipse summer’s balm among hundreds of youngsters in Chittenden County?
That was the question posed Thursday by the all-volunteer Hunger Council of Chittenden County at its quarterly meeting.
“Hunger remains hidden,” council co-chairwoman Eileen Elliot said. “It’s not something most of us talk about in everyday life.” The 20 or so members that gathered at the Congregation of Temple Sinai dug right in: They swapped strategies, stories and progress reports.
And they posed many more difficult questions.
A fundamental one: What, despite their best efforts, is not working? How can it be that at any given time, one-in-five Vermont children faces a risk of hunger?
Federally funded food and meal subsidies periodically face shaky funding, council members agreed. Then they tore into a more immediate, vexing problem: How can we alert (or steer) hungry people to existing programs?
A broader definition of nourishment helps, said Vicky Smith, executive director of the King Street Center in Burlington.
Given the opportunity, youngsters will tend to eat whenever they gather for other rewarding activities, she added; even a dash of academics won’t deter hungry kids.
“It isn’t about literacy; it isn’t about math: it’s about food,” Smith said. “This summer, we’re going to be doing a lot of reading and a lot of eating. They go well together.”
At stake may be not only children’s health but their educational attainment.
Council co-chairman Erik Filkorn, who volunteers as a reader in Richmond schools, said links between attention span and nutrition were relatively easy to spot during the school year, particularly on Mondays — following a weekend’s absence from regular, healthy meals at the cafeteria.
“We’re really looking at hungry families here,” he said.
And what might be the effects be of a summer’s worth of nutritional deprivation?
Lower-income students lose about two months’ worth of reading skills over the summer, contributing to a chronic, accumulating “achievement gap,” said Anore Horton, who manages child nutrition programs at South Burlington-based nonprofit Hunger Free Vermont. Like Smith, she wants the community to forge stronger links between intellectual and emotional growth and healthy food.
Summer programs for children that include one or two meals will open soon at about two dozen locations in Chittenden County — but securing transportation to them remains a challenge to time-and-cash-strapped families.
Statewide, about 30,000 schoolchildren in Vermont rely on free and reduced-cost meals during the school year, Horton said; last summer only about 5,100, or 17 percent, secured access to federal food programs.
Although discouraging, those findings show progress over previous years, and place Vermont 11th in the nation in a per-capita ranking for addressing childhood hunger during summer recess, she said.
How can the rest of us help bring the state into the top 10?
Horton and the others urged Vermonters to spread the word. And to ask for help, if necessary, by calling for hunger help at the United Way of Chittenden County switchboard: Dial 211.
Contact Joel Banner Baird at 660-1843 or
