Advocacy Works: Breakfast After the Bell Success Story

Last year, we celebrated the final passage of Breakfast after the Bell legislation-a culmination of over five years of hard work in Olympia and your repeated calls and emails to legislators urging their support. This was also a big year one milestone for our organization as we work towards our goal of cutting hunger in half by 2028.

This short article and video from KING 5 shows how this legislation is already making a huge impact on access to school breakfast for low-income kids: Bellingham School District has not only implemented breakfast after the bell at all schools required by our law to provide breakfast during the school day instead of beforehand, but they’ve also utilized the clarification that our bill provided that breakfast served in the classroom during normal classroom activities counts as instruction time.

Furthermore, they’ve added the full 1-2 punch of using a federal provision to provide breakfast universally, free of charge. The result? At one school alone, breakfast participation has gone up from 16% under the old practices to 80%!

So thank you again – a heartfelt thank you – for speaking up with legislators and educating others that breakfast after the bell, breakfast in the classroom, and universal breakfast works and helps our kids get the fuel they need to focus on their studies.

Thank you to all for lending your voices to the fight against hunger! Learn more about the issues and what you can do to take action.