40,000 More Students to Get Free Breakfast : Hunger: Most are in West Covina, Garden Grove and Ventura County. But many schools still don’t offer federally funded meal, study says.

Nearly 40,000 more Southern California schoolchildren from Ventura to Orange County will be served free, federally funded school breakfasts when they return to classes this year, according to a study to be released this week.

That means that nearly two-thirds of the Southern California schools with the most impoverished students last fall will serve morning meals to children returning to the classroom this month, or say they intend to do so within the next year, according to the study by the Tomas Rivera Center.

Harry Pachon, president of the Latino think tank in Claremont, is upbeat about the additions, but nonetheless stressed that tens of thousands of poor children in Southern California still cannot get free breakfast because their schools don’t offer the federal entitlement program for a variety of reasons.

“Hunger hurts the learning environment. Teachers must concentrate on kids that are distracted by hunger,” Pachon said. Whether children eat breakfast “is a strong factor in how well our children do.”

The change means that nearly 40,000 more students--many of them in West Covina, Garden Grove, Port Hueneme and Oxnard--will be offered a morning meal, according to the thinktank.

The study was launched after a Times series last fall found that many children in the middle-class suburban community of West Covina and elsewhere in Los Angeles County were going to school hungry. In many of the schools, teachers were delving into their own pockets to feed children whose ability to learn was being stunted by lack of breakfast.

In the 1993-94 school year, 42% of California public schools serving subsidized lunches under a federal program did not offer the breakfast program--leaving about 1 million children without a subsidized morning meal, meaning they often went without breakfast altogether.

Hunger in children, studies show, produces fatigue, dizziness, lower test scores and higher absence and tardiness rates. The UCLA School of Public Health has launched an elaborate clinical study aimed at determining how many children in Los Angeles schools are malnourished.

Some schools have opposed feeding children breakfast at school, calling it anti-family and a usurpation of what should be parents’ responsibility. But the study said the subsequent public outcry over a lack of breakfast programs prodded many schools to reverse their opposition.

The study examined so-called “needy” schools in five Southern California counties, where 40% or more of the students qualify for free breakfast, but none was offered. Of the 156 needy schools the study examined in November, 1994, 85 schools had high minority enrollments.

Of those 85 schools, 52 now said they had recently launched a breakfast program, were beginning a program this fall or planned to do so by the fall of 1996.

The remaining 33 needy schools that lacked a breakfast program were almost all elementary schools; half had so many poor children enrolled that 60% to 69% of them qualified for free or reduced-price breakfasts. (Any child whose family earns 30% above the poverty level or less qualifies for a free meal).

The Ontario-Montclair School District, home to nearly half of the needy schools studied, has no immediate plans to begin serving breakfast at 15 needy schools. But the East Whittier City School District, which has the single poorest school--Evergreen Elementary, where 86% of the children qualify--isn’t offering federally funded breakfasts at four needy schools.

Some in the community have philosophical objections to a breakfast program.

“Parents who allow their youngsters to leave home without breakfast are not very concerned about their children,” wrote Patrick and Rosemary Hart in a letter to the Whittier Daily News last month, echoing sentiments expressed at meetings The Times wrote about last year.

“How much does a bowl of oatmeal, some fruit and bread cost? I would wager that these same parents have plenty of money for junk food and other nonessentials.” The couple continued: “The issue is not about affordability, but about responsibility.”

The East Whittier City School District’s objections to the program are based on cost, but Pachon says they are unfounded.

Indeed, the study found two chief reasons that schools don’t offer breakfasts: a lack of information about the federal program and concerns about implementation and cost.

Many of the concerns, Pachon said, stem from misinformation: The government pays schools $1.30 for each free breakfast served, plenty to cover the 70-cent cost of a cold breakfast. The balance can be applied to labor costs, and schools can also apply for federal or state start-up grants to help buy refrigerators and other equipment to get breakfast programs rolling.

Many schools are holding off on starting programs for fear that the Republican-led Congress will eliminate federal lunch and breakfast programs, something that now appears unlikely to happen, said Laurie True, senior policy analyst with California Food Policy Advocates, which lobbies for children’s food programs in Sacramento and Washington.