Seven out of 10 Arkansas teachers regularly see students arrive to school without having gotten enough to eat at home, according to a report on child hunger released Thursday.
Nationally, three in five teachers see hunger in the classroom, according to the nationwide survey of 1,000 kindergarten through eighth-grade schoolteachers by Share Our Strength, a Washington, D.C.-based group with the goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015.
"I have had students who come to school and haven't eaten since lunch the day before," Kim Wilson, Arkansas Teacher of the Year 2012 and teacher at Monticello High School, told Share Our Strength. "Hungry students simply can't focus and learn."
Fifty-six percent of Arkansas teachers say the hunger problem is growing, the report says, with 71% of the surveyed teachers in the state saying that "a lot" or "most" of their students rely on school meals as their primary nutrition source.
Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry Center for Best Practices reported that in Arkansas, only 53.7 percent of children who receive free or reduced-price lunches also use the School Breakfast Program, and only 13.6 percent participate in the free Summer Meals Program.
Children from families with incomes below 130 percent of the poverty level, or $29,064 for a family of four, are eligible for free meals, while those with incomes between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level, or $42,643 for a family of four, are eligible for reduced-price meals, according to the state Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education.
Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry program partners with Gov. Mike Beebe and the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance with a common aim of getting nutritious food to children in need, the organization said.
In the two years it has worked with the No Kid Hungry campaign, the state has moved from being ranked 50th when it came to child hunger to 41st, Beebe told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette earlier this month.
Online forms for the state’s Child Nutrition Programs are available at the Arkansas Department of Education’s Child Nutrition Unit website.