IN A RECENT issue of The Ann Arbor Independent, the newspaper published an article which identified a cluster of Ann Arbor elementary schools at which fewer than 10 percent of the fifth grade students have scored “Advanced” on the MEAP in science, reading and mathematics since 2008. Race is often blamed when explaining such pronounced and stubborn academic under-achievement. However, The Ann Arbor Independent’s investigation and analyses revealed a correlation between the number of students receiving free and reduced price breakfasts and lunches in the cluster of elementary schools examined, and their failure to demonstrate “Advanced” mastery of MEAP subjects.
Hunger and poor academic achievement go hand-in-hand. Fifth graders who fail to score advanced on the MEAP, studies show, post lower high school GPAs and as a result are less likely to graduate and go on to college.
In conjunction with the AAPS’s high school leaders, Dr. Jeanice Kerr Swift recently drew up a list of her “expectations for alternative and traditional high school enhancements.” Among those expectations was “Food & Nutrition – 3 meals daily, food pantry and weekend backpack meals.”
While it’s not yet clear how those expectations will be met, by whom, and where the money will come from, Dr. Swift’s inclusion of food and nutrition among her expectations concerning improvements to our city’s high school programs and support systems is encouraging. In an affluent community such as Ann Arbor, it’s all too easy to believe that hunger is a problem that impacts students in Ypsilanti. At some elementary schools in the district, almost half of the students receive free or reduced price meals.
Food pantries in local high schools would be a welcome innovation that fully engages an important reality facing Ann Arbor’s schools. Weekend backpack meals is an idea Dr. Swift brought with her from Colorado, where Hunger Free Colorado works closely with nine school districts to see that homeless students take home backpacks loaded with enough food to keep the kids fed over the weekends.
We applaud Dr. Swift’s initiatives and urge her, as this paper has done in past, to work together with local community farms, Food Gatherers as well as Project Grow. We also urge her to dedicate land owned by the AAPS to the production of food to be distributed to our city’s needy, including her students and their families.
