TO BE LEANER OR MEANER ?

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

At about 8 a.m. every weekday, children begin arriving early in the cafeteria at Rafael Hernandez Elementary School in Newark, New Jersey, to be sure they do not miss the free, hot breakfast offered each morning. At 8:20 last Friday, about 150 kids filled the cafeteria, talking about their favorite TV shows and eating their cereal and pancakes and drinking their juice and milk. The menu doesn't always please everyone. Ten-year-old Jennifer Silva would prefer Pop-Tarts or even pizza for breakfast. But she knows that if she misses breakfast at school, she won't eat that morning. And when that happens, Jennifer says, "I feel horrible."

On Chicago's ravaged West Side, the Nathan Goldblatt School stops serving breakfast at 8:45 a.m. But occasionally food-service manager Diane Spraggs needs to bend the rules. One day last week a skinny seventh-grade boy showed up in the cafeteria five minutes late. "When I told him that breakfast was over, he started to cry," Spraggs recalls. "We couldn't turn him away." At Goldblatt, 85% of the students qualify for free food. Kids being kids, many proudly insist they could do without. Spraggs knows otherwise. "[They] don't want to tell you that they're not getting enough to eat at home," she says. "But if they cut this program, I don't know what they are going to do."

School administrators and parents around the country were expressing similar concerns last week. When economist Milton Friedman proclaimed in 1974 that "there's no such thing as a free lunch," he captured the truth that nothing comes without some cost. But the costs of the National School Lunch Act, passed in 1946, also yields real benefits. It enables around 14 million children to eat nutritious lunches for free or at reduced prices at a total cost to taxpayers of $4.454 billion. But not since the notorious condiment incident of 1981, when the Reagan Administration attempted to reclassify catsup and pickles as vegetables, has this aid been in such jeopardy. Last week the Committee on Economic and Education Opportunities sent a bill to the floor of the House that proposes replacing three federal nutrition programs for the poor-school lunches, a day-care nutrition program and Women, Infants, Children (WIC), which provides supplements to pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under five-with block grants to the states. The bill's drafters claim that it will save $6.7 billion over five years by reducing administrative costs. The states, they add, will be better able to ensure that the food goes only to those who qualify. "The argument is not over whether you should have a school-lunch program," said House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "It's whether you trust the states to have a school-lunch program, or you think the only agency worthy of trust in America is Washington."

Republicans contend that truly needy children will continue to receive benefits. But with this particular issue-which will affect 1 in 10 Americans, the majority of them children-Democrats have been given an opportunity to seize some political advantage. "The American public expects us to cut spending and downsize government," says Wisconsin Democrat David Obey, ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, "but I don't think they expect us to make war on kids."

The flaws in the proposal, children's advocates insist, are many and terrifying. By allocating money to the states in block grants, for instance, an unexpected economic downturn in one region could have catastrophic effects. "If the wheat crop is bad one year or Boeing lays off 5,000 people," says the Rev. Sam Muyskens, executive director of the Inter-Faith Ministries in Wichita, Kansas, "there will be more hungry children but no more money available to feed them." Muyskens' organization administered a recent survey that found that 1 in 22 children in Kansas should be classified as hungry. Republican lawmakers, however, maintain that emergency funds can be made available under these circumstances.

In addition to removing the nutrition programs from federal supervision, the proposed changes also sharply slice the total amount of money available by $860 million in fiscal 1996 and $7 billion over five years. Programs that provide food during the summer and to preschoolers in child care would be slashed 45% in fiscal 1996. "It's a complete retrenchment from the federal role to ensure that poor children in this country receive nutrition assistance," says Susan Steinmetz, director of the welfare-reform division at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an advocacy group for the poor. "One couldn't imagine a more ill-advised proposal. It's amazing."

Retrenchment, however, seems to be precisely the idea. Conservatives contend that free food has done little to solve the problems plaguing the nation. "What does a hot school lunch offer to a 16-year-old girl who is pregnant?" asks Robert Rector, senior policy analyst for welfare issues at the Heritage Foundation. "What does a hot school lunch offer two 16-year-olds in D.C. who are shooting each other in the school halls with semiautomatic weapons? ... Go into any housing project and you don't see kids bent over with rickets. You see strong healthy young men who are a danger to themselves and their community."

Appearances can be deceiving, for hunger and its particular dangers cannot always be seen from the outside. Rickets may seem like a quaint problem, or the answer to a trivia quiz, but school administrators still know firsthand what it is like to deal with a child who is not getting enough to eat. Linda Butcher, coordinator for health services in Oxnard elementary school district, a California agricultural community with about 14,000 students, says that before her schools applied for the School Breakfast Program, students would start feeling sick in the middle of the morning. Instead of playing during recess, they would lie down. "We would go to our school kitchen and beg for a little peanut-butter sandwich or milk to hold them over,'' says Butcher. "Often the older brother would come in and ask for something and then ask for something for his little brother and then his little sister. They just had nothing in their refrigerator at home." Butcher says that now that these kids get breakfast, they are more energetic.

A 1987 study by the Tufts University school of nutrition reported that participation in the School Breakfast Program is associated with significant improvements in academic functioning among low-income elementary schoolchildren. A 1993 study by a professor at the University of California at Davis found that anemic and iron-deficient toddlers lag as much as 25% behind their peers in mental development. According to the General Accounting Office, WIC, which served 6.5 million people in 1994, saves $3.50 in special-education and Medicaid costs for every dollar invested in prenatal care. Infant-mortality rates dropped more than 50% from 1974 to 1991. The idea that these gains may be rolled back has alarmed some children's advocates. Predicts J. Larry Brown, director of the Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition Policy at Tufts University: "We are going to see levels of damage that we have not seen in 40 or 50 years."

The legislation, along with other welfare-reform proposals still in committee, is expected to pass the House in late March. If not dramatically modified by Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans, the President would then probably wield his veto. As the budget battle continues to take shape, other partisan objectives may change: last week Republicans abandoned plans to eliminate the food-stamp program.

--Reported by Ann Blackman and Nina Burleigh/Washington, Wendy Cole/Chicago, Sharon E. Epperson/Newark and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN AND NINA BURLEIGH/WASHINGTON, WENDY COLE/CHICAGO, SHARON E. EPPERSON/NEWARK AND JEANNE MCDOWELL/LOS ANGELES