11% of public elementary school pupils malnourished

ELEVEN percent of children enrolled in public elementary schools under the Department of Education’s Cebu Provincial Schools Division are undernourished.

But the schools are working to change this.

Under the Department of Education’s (DepEd) School-Based Feeding Program (SBFP) to address undernutrition and short-term hunger among public school children, more than 1.9 million severely wasted and wasted children nationwide from kindergarten to Grade 6 joined a 120-day feeding program in school year (SY) 2016-2017.

Wasting (being too thin for one’s height) indicates acute undernutrition.

The SBFP started in 2010 in selected schools nationwide, said Cebu Provincial Schools Division nurse-in-charge Reynaldo Payot.

“By 2015, 501 of the (Cebu Provincial Schools) division’s 892 public elementary schools were recipients of this,” he said.

In SY 2016-2017, the beneficiary schools in the division climbed to 783 public elementary schools where 35,846 children were fed, of whom 8,211 were severely wasted and 27,635 wasted.

After the feeding, the number of severely wasted children dropped to 3,524, and wasted children to 14,273.

To check their nutritional status, the weight and height of all enrollees are taken at the start of the school year, to get the baseline data, and at the end of the school year, for the end-line data. But those part of the 120-day feeding program also get their height and weight taken midway through the program.

Of the 359,476 pupils enrolled in public elementary schools in the 55 districts under the Cebu Provincial Schools Division in SY 2016-2017, Payot said 332,001 were weighed.

Since 35,846 of the 332,011 weighed were found to be wasted or severely wasted, that means 11 percent of the school children were undernourished.

The division covers Cebu’s 44 towns. The wasted were found from kindergarten to Grade 6.

“Even in high school, we have wasted pupils. But they are not included in the feeding,” he said.

Payot said most pupils in the province don’t eat quality food, or they go to school without having breakfast, in some cases due to parental neglect.

With the feeding program, school attendance rose to 85-100 percent, he said.

Budget

The budget for the SBFP is P16/day for the food cost per child, and P2/day per child for the operational cost. So the cost for the 2016-2017 feeding was P77,427,360, of which P68,824,320 went to the food cost for 120 days for the 35,846 beneficiaries.

Operational costs are those associated with buying utensils or paying “volunteer cooks” because the teachers don’t have the time to do the cooking.

“The guidelines say if a school has more than 40 beneficiaries, it may use the money for operational costs to hire a volunteer cook,” he said.

As of early July, the list of beneficiaries for this year had yet to be submitted to the DepEd.

The students are fed lunch. If there is no separate feeding area, they use their classrooms.

“The guidelines say we need volunteers from the parents on a scheduled basis to help our teachers prepare the food for the children in school. That’s why we encourage the schools to provide a feeding area. But the schools can’t afford also, so we encourage the schools to ask partners, like non-government organizations, the local government unit, or the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), or other stakeholders if they could construct an ordinary makeshift feeding area,” Payot said.

He cited the Taloot Central School in Argao II district as having a good feeding center at the back of its school building.

“That serves as our pilot for other schools to imitate. According to the Central principal, they got aid from the stakeholders and from the MOOE (Maintenance and Other Operating Expenses) of their school,” and they re-used galvanized iron sheets from a wrecked building, he said.

School garden

To support hunger mitigation, the DepEd also requires all public elementary and secondary schools nationwide to establish a Gulayan sa Paaralan Program (GPP) as a source of vegetables and other ingredients for the SBFP and other feeding programs.

Payot said schools should plant yellow and green leafy vegetables, root crops, vine vegetables, and fruit vegetables like tomato and eggplant.

DepEd Memorandum 223, s. 2016 says each school should allot at least a 200-square-meter area for the garden, or adopt container gardening.

“They can use waste containers no longer being used, like sacks, plastic containers, cans, gallons, tires, basins. Now, they even use the one-liter Coke bottles,” he said.

“It’s called edible landscaping, a component of the GPP. That is a minute garden placed in front of or at the back of the teacher or class adviser. That’s where they get their vegetables for the feeding program.”

This frees up their funds for the purchase of a variety of food for more nutritional value.

Other sources

Another source for the SBFP is the school canteen proceeds, he said, where a portion of the net income is set aside for the school’s feeding program.

Payot revealed that outside the SBFP is a longer-running supplementary feeding program called the Applied Nutrition Program (ANP) where all the children are fed.

“It is to supplement (the nutrition of) our pupils who go to school without breakfast,” he said.

But while the ANP has been around “since time immemorial,” he also said it was “not effective” because sometimes the parents get lazy and do it only in the month of July when it’s supposed to be done year round and daily. This depends on the parents because it is part of the PTA homeroom activity.

After the World Health Organization included stunting (low height for age) among the child growth standards for determining nutritional status, Payot said that starting this school year, they would also identify and monitor the severely stunted, stunted and tall from kindergarten to Grade 12.

“Because last time, we focused only on BMI (Body Mass Index),” he said.

It’s a tall order.

“The Cebu Provincial Schools Division has only 20 existing nurses, including me, to take care of kindergarten, Grades 1-6, Grades 7-10 and Sped (special education) students,” he said.

Sixteen newly hired nurses will take care of Grades 11-12.

Future

In 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals called for ending malnutrition by 2030, including achieving by 2025 a 40 percent reduction in the number of children under five who are stunted, and the reduction of childhood wasting to less than five percent.

In his message on Universal Children's Day last November, United Nations Children's Fund executive director Anthony Lake said by protecting the rights of children, the world is protecting its common future. (CTL)

Children from Kindergarten to Grade 6 nationwide covered by the Department of Education’s School-Based Feeding Program for SY 2016-2017

533,425 Severely wasted children

1,385,039 Wasted children

(Source: DepEd Department Order 51, s. 2016)