Inside the rush as Minnesota schools serve millions more free breakfasts

For a frenzied 15 minutes each school day morning, 400 hungry children charge through the lunchroom at Echo Park Elementary School in Burnsville, snaking through in two speedy lines for free breakfast.

"It's like Los Angeles traffic" from 9:15 to 9:30 a.m., school principal Logan Schultz, said while high-fiving students before they chose between cereal and scrambled eggs.

Minnesota's free school meals program took effect before the 2023-24 school year, and schools served 13.8 million more breakfasts that year than the year before — a 40% increase. That surge has resulted in a mad morning rush of hungry kids at schools across the state, as well as a need for more school kitchen staff.

More food also means more messes for teachers and custodians, and far less space in kitchen coolers, sometimes requiring Tetris-level storage solutions and tweaks to delivery schedules.

The number of lunches served also jumped — by about 14 million, or 15% — but school leaders say that increase was easier to manage logistically. Lunchtimes can be staggered so as not to overcrowd cafeterias.

The solution isn't so easy at breakfast time, when kids may be dropped off at school or arrive by bus just 15 to 30 minutes before the first bell.

Some schools, including those in the Anoka-Hennepin district — the state's largest, offer "grab-and-go" breakfasts (think breakfast burritos or cinnamon rolls) that students can easily eat while on the go around the building or heading to class if they don't have enough time to sit down.

At Echo Park Elementary, students fill a bag with their choice of fruit, cereal or a hot food item to take to class to eat while teachers take attendance.

To keep the line moving, students heading through the line don't have to punch in their ID numbers. Instead, a staff member simply scans a barcode on a tag attached to their backpack.

The cafeteria crush of students doesn't include the youngest children — school staff learned that for efficiency and maybe to avoid collisions, it's easier to have preschool and kindergarten students choose items from a cart that makes the rounds of their classrooms.

"COVID really normalized some of these transitions," Schultz said, adding, "Kids got used to eating in their classrooms" when social-distancing rules prohibited full cafeterias, requiring new solutions.

Though some meals are messier than others, Echo Park kindergarten teacher Abby Balster said the cleanup is more than worth it: "The kids are just much more able to start their day right when their tummies are full."

Logistical challenges

The demand for free meals has required schools to hire additional nutritional services staff or increase their hours. The South Washington County district added more than 20 staff members to help with the increased volume of meals this year.

"I don't think we ever thought we'd see numbers like this," Wendy Peterson, the district's nutrition director, said of the number of meals served. "Many schools — when it comes to the sheer numbers — are serving food for the equivalent of like two, three or four weddings every day. And in a very short amount of time."

Minnesota is one of nine states where all public schools can offer free meals to students. The state program was projected to cost about $400 million over two years, but because of rising food costs and lower-than-expected federal reimbursement, it's projected to cost Minnesota another $81 million in the next two years.

Serving hundreds more meals each day brings other logistical challenges, too.

Blaine High School is transitioning from a once-a-week food deliveries to a twice-a-week delivery schedule. The school was running out of storage space for the volume of food it was getting to meet demand, said Noah Atlas, Anoka-Hennepin's director of child nutrition. Such a shift, he said, might soon be needed at Coon Rapids Middle School, where delivery time requires the Tetris-like strategy of fitting boxes of juice and milk into the cold storage room.

Schools also now must be more insistent about asking parents to fill out paperwork that once determined whether a family qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. Those forms are no longer required for lunch or breakfast, but they are still used to calculate how much state funding districts receive for other programs, including extra support for students learning English, for example.

"Nutrition programs have had to work all through these challenges," Peterson said. "But in the end, the payoff is that we're seeing better behavior of the students, and their attention span has increased because they're not hungry."