The government-funded School Meals Programme is to inaugurate a separate
facility to prepare meals for school out of a centre to be located at the Urlings
Primary School.
Making the announcement, Education Minister, Daryll Matthew said, acting on a
suggestion from Senator Samantha Marshall about the need to decentralise the
work of the School Meals Programme, it was decided to establish the food
preparation and distribution centre at Urlings to serve the schools in the southern
corridor of Antigua.
“Decentralising the preparation of meals also means decentralising the risks. If
there’s only one food preparation facility, when anything goes wrong it may affect
the whole food production and distribution system. Having a second facility helps
to reduce that risk,” Matthew stated.
Matthew also announced that the School Meals Programme has launched a pilot
project where breakfast is served to the children in selected primary schools on
school days free of cost. He added that currently approximately four hundred
students from primary schools are served breakfast each day. This is in addition to
being served with lunch as well.
The minister identified the Golden Grove Primary School as one of the institutions
where breakfast is served. He said the plan is to extend the programme to more
schools during the next academic year beginning in September.
“Many studies have concluded that nutrition is an important part of learning. What
we have observed is that in the lower income communities, particularly the densely
populated urban communities, where there is an above-average level of poverty as
well as a heightened level of single-parent households, the children tend to suffer
and struggle as the families are just coping to provide the basics for the children.
So while the lunch is good, we also recognized that many children are going to
school hungry because they did not have breakfast. We, therefore, started this
programme in the school meals programme to provide breakfast for children from
vulnerable communities,” he revealed.
Minister Matthew did not provide the figures for the additional costs that the
government now has to bear for the breakfast, but he stated that it is a necessary
initiative.
“This is related to something I have said before; that our children’s ability to
compete in this world ought not to be determined by their socio-economic status
within which they are born. It can’t be that children from wealthy households who
go to early children centres and daycares eat a healthy breakfast in the mornings
and therefore start life at an advantage over the children from the lower income
families. These children are behind the ‘curse’ by the time they get to primary
school, so the morning breakfast is one of the policy initiatives designed to close
that gap,” he remarked.
