Food security in Winnipeg schools: ensuring no student goes hungry

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/01/2025 (250 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The news on conflict, poverty and crime is so bad and so overwhelming that sometimes we forget that good things happen, too.

On Dec. 13 at Hugh John Macdonald School on Bannatyne Avenue in Winnipeg, one of those good things occurred; students, parents, teachers, philanthropists and representatives from the federal, provincial and municipal governments met to celebrate the installation of a renovated kitchen designed to ensure that no student at the school would ever again begin the day hungry.

My wife and I were privileged to attend the event and were met at the door by enthusiastic members of the student council who escorted us to the kitchen. Hugh John Macdonald School is benefiting by being included in the Winnipeg School Division nutrition program which, in turn, has been able to expand with support from the province, federal government and philanthropic sector.

“This is huge for us. Huge,” said Jennifer Scott, principal of Hugh John Macdonald, about the nutrition program.

“This is going to allow us to really scale and feed all the kids that are hungry.”

There is a vast amount of research on the multiple benefits of school breakfast and lunch programs: the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, for example, reports that school food programs improve cognition, enabling students to be more alert, pay better attention and do better in math and reading scores. A 2012 study by the Toronto School Board, Feeding our Future, in a large sample of Grade 7 and 8 students showed that 61 per cent of students who ate breakfast achieved or exceeded provincial reading standards, compared to 50 per cent who did not.

Investing in school nutrition programs is therefore as close to a universal good in education policy as one is likely to find. And the need is great: Food Matters Manitoba reports that “Over 14 per cent of Manitobans, 60 per cent of Northern residents living on reserve and over one in five children across the province experience Household Food Insecurity.” Harvest Manitoba, for example, provides food security programs to over 100,000 Manitobans every month in 50 communities across the province.

Teachers and principals have long known about the debilitating impact of hunger in their classrooms. Many I know used their own money to buy granola bars and fruit for their neediest students.

But help is now on the way; 79 schools receive funding from the nutrition program, for school kitchen construction or renovation, hiring chefs or grants for food purchases. Senior governments have come together, often a rarity in our federation, to contribute to this critical initiative. In January 2024, the province announced it would invest $30 million to expand school nutrition, much of it going directly to school divisions.

As Premier Wab Kinew stated, “kids can’t learn on an empty stomach.” The federal government announced, in June 2024, a National School Food Policy to provide meals for up to 400,000 children a year, and in October, Manitoba signed an agreement with the Government of Canada to expand school food programs even more to include thousands of additional Manitoba children.

This is co-operative federalism at its best.

Also present at Hugh John Macdonald School were Maria and Walter Schroeder, whose foundation has also partnered with the Winnipeg School Division in providing grants for food security and education opportunity programs in North End schools.

The Schroeders told a story about growing up in the area and how an individual act of a caring educator changed their lives. Maria Schroeder faced the prospect of being forced to leave school until the principal at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate paid a visit to her home and persuaded her family that she was one of the school’s most promising students.

What made this story especially meaningful to the Hugh John Macdonald students was that the daughter of that principal, now in her 80s, was at the opening of the kitchen to recall her father’s impact.

There is meaning for all of us in that story. Individual acts of kindness and engagement can have an enormous ripple effect on future generations. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” said Martin Luther King Jr. “but it bends toward justice.”

In Manitoba, that arc is finally bending towards ensuring that no student goes hungry.

Thomas S. Axworthy is public policy chair of Massey College and volunteers as an adviser to the Schroeder Foundation.