As children head back to school, families are thinking about new teachers, new classrooms, school supplies, sports, activities, and how to manage busy work and family schedules.
But there is another important part of back-to-school preparation that deserves attention: food access both inside and outside the school.
Many people think food access is only an issue for low-income children. In fact, access impacts children and families of all income levels in all communities.
For children to learn, grow, and thrive, they need regular, nutritious meals and snacks. School meals play a critical role, but what happens before school, after school, on weekends, and during school breaks matters, too.
This is why conversations about school children and food access need to go beyond simply asking whether a school provides kitchens and in-school meals.
We also need to ask: What does the food environment look like around the school itself and around where children live?
The start of a new school year is a great time for each school to hit the refresh button and formulate its good food plan.
Questions to Explore Inside and Outside the School
School breakfast and lunch programs provide an important nutritional safety net for children. But a child does not spend the entire day at school.
Families still need access to affordable, nutritious food outside school hours. That means looking at grocery stores, transportation, household resources, neighborhood conditions, and other food retailers nearby.
Some important questions include:
- What is the quality of corner and other food stores located very close to schools?
- What about where students live? How far is the closest quality grocery store?
- Do families choose unhealthy foods regularly because it is difficult to reach other options? This concerns geographic access.
- Can families afford enough healthy food? This concerns financial access. How many meals are missed because families cannot afford them after accounting for school meals, government programs, and even help from friends and family?
- What is each student’s Food Balance Score? Food Balance is a block-level metric we developed that reveals how difficult it is for residents of a particular block to reach a food store that offers healthy foods compared with one that does not.
- What foods and meals are offered inside the school? How fresh and nutritious are they, and are students enthusiastic about them?
- Does the school have a kitchen, garden, nutritional education, or fun healthy food activities? How are these assets planned for, implemented, and evaluated?
We find that even wealthy communities can include otherwise hidden pockets of households experiencing food insecurity.
Distinctions Between Geographic Healthy Grocery Access, Food Balance, and Food Security
Understanding these distinctions is critical when assessing local conditions inside and outside your school.
The lack of adequate geographic access to a quality grocery store, which in extreme cases can result in a food desert, and the lack of financial access to food, or food insecurity, are two different things.
The rising cost of fuel, groceries, and other essential goods and services has stressed households of varying income levels, including those considered middle class.
One family may live relatively close to a quality grocer but still struggle to afford enough healthy food. Another may have the resources to purchase healthy food but face significant geographic or transportation barriers. They may choose quicker but less nutritious options simply because they are more convenient.
Children who walk to and from school or are free to leave during lunch breaks may also turn to nearby stores and fast-food restaurants for meals and snacks.
If the route to school is saturated with food options high in fat, salt, sugar, and calories but low in nutrition, children can be affected over the course of the school year.
Potential Impacts on Diet-related Health and Academic Performance
In Iowa, we found that K-12 students who lived close to an unhealthy food store and far from a quality grocer had worse academic performance by a full letter grade, accounting for factors such as parental income and education.
Students were also statistically shorter in stature, and parents were impacted by increased diet-related diabetes.
In addition to caring about student health and well-being, school administrators are measured by factors such as school quality and student test scores. If the local environment is negatively impacting how children are learning, understanding those conditions becomes important to effective school planning.
Data and Analysis that Informs Strategic School Planning and Programs
Our methods include block-level assessments of Food Access and Food Balance.
Our Meal Deficit Metric (MDM) was developed to distinguish between geographic and financial access to healthy foods. The model calculates unmet food need at very small geographic levels by accounting for food households already receive through sources such as government programs, charitable giving, school meals, household income, and help from friends and family.
Our scores are expressed in net missing meals.
We can also analyze public and private schools according to their unique school boundaries. This helps individual schools and larger school systems understand local conditions, take effective action, and monitor progress.
The USDA cancelled its annual hunger survey, but our Meal Deficit Metric will continue. Learn more about the Meal Deficit Metric and the USDA hunger survey.
How localized are these scores? Consider Florida. We partitioned the state into more than 13,600 small areas and scored each one. Our model has been applied to the state for five separate time periods. Learn more about our Florida project and hyperlocal analysis.
I have long advocated for high-quality, hyperlocal data, and analysis.
Broad statistics aggregated or averaged across a ZIP Code or school catchment area can be useful, but they can also mask significant patterns within them. Our research frequently uses much smaller geographic units, including Census block groups, individual blocks, and even points on a block, to identify neighborhood-level patterns that may otherwise remain hidden.
This type of information can help inform areas of focus in a school’s healthy food plan, including:
- School breakfast and lunch programs
- Backpack programs that send food home with children
- Food pantries and charitable feeding
- Locally grown nutritious foods
- SNAP and other government support
- Transportation access
- Health and social services
- Nutritional education
- School gardens
- Fun, healthy food activities
- Areas within the school catchment area that lack healthy grocery access
- Strengthening community assets such as farms and farmers markets
Connecting the Pieces: A Healthy School Year Starts Beyond the School Building
A healthy school year clearly includes more than school meals, as important as they are.
Back-to-school season is a natural time for school systems and individual schools to assess conditions and develop a plan. Localized data, mapping, and statistical analysis can help make that plan more effective. We pair this data with strategies, programs, action plans, tracking, and evaluation.
Our toolkit can help communities move beyond the question, “How many families are food insecure in our general area?”
Instead, we can ask:
“Where are the unmet meals at pinpointed locations across our school district, how many are missed each week, and where can we strategically direct resources?”
That is a much more actionable question.
Our food store data can also help local officials and economic development organizations find ways to improve healthy retail access. Learn more about retail agglomeration and neighborhood retail dynamics.
Why should we do this when we already have so much on our plates?
Because if we want children to truly blossom and reach their potential, we need to look beyond the school building and understand the environments surrounding them, not just during the school year, but over the course of their lifetime.
Have a Question About Food Access or Your School Community?
If you are a school leader, district administrator, community organization, government agency, or other organization trying to better understand food access and the conditions affecting children and families, I’d be happy to hear from you.
Reach out to me directly: Mari@MariGallagher.com. We can discuss how hyperlocal data, mapping, and community-level analysis may help you better understand your local food environment and identify opportunities for action.
About Mari Gallagher
Mari Gallagher is the founder and principal of Mari Gallagher Research & Consulting Group and a nationally recognized expert in food access, grocery market analysis, neighborhood markets, hyperlocal data modeling, and community health.
Her work has included assessing and improving school food environments. She developed a special lens to identify the geographic locations of the most nutritionally vulnerable children under five years of age.
She popularized the term “food desert” and motivated Congressional action. Mari also develops hyperlocal models such as the Meal Deficit Metric, which measures net missing meals after accounting for the many ways households obtain food.
Her work examines how the places where we live, shop, work, and access essential resources can influence health and quality of life. Through research, data, community-level analysis, and strategy, Mari helps organizations better understand local conditions and improve quality and length of life.
