It’s 5:30 am, and Brattleboro Town Food Service Director, Ali West, and her kitchen manager, Linda Griffin, are already hard at work preparing to feed a nourishing breakfast to more than 550 local children in the three Brattleboro Town elementary schools.

Green Street School was the first school in the district to offer Breakfast After the Bell, and it is a wildly successful program, with the highest breakfast participation rates in Windham County last year. This year, Academy and Oak Grove Schools decided to follow Green Street’s lead, which created a welcome challenge to Ali West, who is fiercely dedicated to feeding children in our schools. Breakfast After the Bell builds time to eat breakfast into the school day eliminating the difficult decision students are otherwise faced with—do I play outside with friends or fuel up before the start of the school day? It’s widely promoted as a way to increase breakfast participation rates—and Oak Grove and Academy are excellent case studies.

School breakfast participation rates

January 2019            vs January 2020

Academy School 45.6%                  84.4%

Green Street School 78.7%                         84.8%

Oak Grove 52.5%                               83.1% 

The breakfasts are all prepared at the Academy School kitchen, which serves as a central kitchen for the three schools. Ali and her staff developed systems to enable this morning ritual to run like a well-oiled machine, and a few months ago she invited us in to see just what goes into prepping breakfast every day.

In addition to waking up early to get things going, breakfast prep actually begins the afternoon before when all components of the breakfast are assembled. Then, before sunrise, final preparations go into full swing, the positive energy of three strong women (Linda is joined in the kitchen every morning by Lucia Hawkins and Jazzy Nightingale) working together as a team to feed the children while chatting, laughing, listening to the radio, and answering trivia questions.

Each classroom receives a bag packed with student’s orders, which might include breakfast sandwiches, bagels, homemade muffins, or the ever-popular option for picky eaters: cereal and milk. Each breakfast also comes with fruit or juice. Bags are delivered to classrooms as students arrive, and teachers have developed creative ways to successfully incorporate breakfast into their morning classroom routines. From Lauren Reavey’s 1st grade class whose “student breakfast helper” fills out the paperwork to Eugene Frost, facilities manager of Green Street, who delivers each bag to the classrooms before the students arrive—all staff and faculty take some part of making this a thriving success for our students.

“Knowing that I’m feeding children who might not otherwise get a healthy breakfast helps me start the day out right,” says Linda. “It’s important that our students receive the nourishment they need to be successful in the classroom, and I’m proud to be a part of universal breakfast in Brattleboro.”