Breakfast Club
Mission
The mission of the Breakfast Club is to promote equity in school meals to ensure all children have access to healthy food in Virginia schools.
Overview
The Breakfast Club was initiated in 2019 as a subgroup of the No Kid Hungry Virginia Breakfast Stakeholders. The collaboration has developed into quarterly meetings to build partnerships, promote breakfast celebrations, and advocate for best practices. The Breakfast Club was influential in updating the questions, answers, and scoring metric for the Virginia Department of Education's Governor's Nutrition and Physical Activity Scorecard.
The Breakfast Club is a collaboration of nutrition and equity professionals from multiple Virginia sectors including non-profit organizations, government agencies, and school nutrition directors from across the state. The shared goal is to promote recommendations and best practices to improve the nutritional quality of school breakfast.
The group focuses on relieving the barrier of hunger for students to focus on learning. Each Breakfast Club meeting works towards the Virginia Department of Education’s goal to achieve 70 percent average daily school breakfast participation among free and reduced students compared to school lunch participation. The Breakfast Club's best practices address: removing barriers to breakfast access, increasing consumption of high quality protein foods, reducing consumption of sugar, and increasing participation by providing new, innovative menu items.
Breakfast Club Award
In 2021, the Breakfast Club established the first Breakfast Club Award to recognize schools achieving success in school breakfast and to provide recipient schools with promotional items for National School Breakfast Week.
The recipients of the 2021 Breakfast Club Award are:
- Read Mountain Middle School, Botetourt County Public Schools
- St. Paul School, Carroll County Public Schools
- Hopkins Road Elementary School, Chesterfield County Public Schools
- Sycamore Park Elementary School, Culpeper County Public Schools
- Northside Middle School, Norfolk City Public Schools
- Orange Elementary School, Orange County Public Schools
Resources
- Breakfast Club's 2019-2020 Best Practices for a Nutritious Breakfast-This is a Word document.
- Breakfast Club Award Information-This is a Word document.
- Farm to Breakfast Information-This is a Word document.
Contact Information
For more information on the Breakfast Club, contact the VDOE Wellness Policy Specialist, Laura Burns, via email at laura.burns@doe.virginia.gov.