Teachers' Experience and Perspectives of Traditional Breakfast and Breakfast in the Classroom.
OBJECTIVE
To understand teachers' perceptions about Breakfast in the Classroom and traditional breakfast.


DESIGN
An electronic survey was sent to teachers across the state of Utah. Teachers responded to an open-ended question exploring what they liked and/or disliked about Breakfast in the Classroom and traditional breakfast.


SETTING
Schools across the state of Utah.


PARTICIPANTS
Kindergarten through grade 12 teachers who were members of the Utah Education Association.


PHENOMENON OF INTEREST
Teachers' opinions regarding Breakfast in the Classroom and traditional school breakfast ANALYSIS: Researchers independently coded all responses and then grouped codes into themes. Themes were reviewed recursively over time.


RESULTS
The 3 overarching themes were food and nutrition, administration of school breakfast, and student outcomes. Aspects most commonly disliked were the nutrition or quality of food, the mess created, the time required, coordination and logistical issues, behavioral issues, and waste. Aspects most commonly liked were breakfast being available to all students, students being fed or not hungry, coordination and logistics, and student learning and academics.


CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
Teachers liked and disliked aspects of Breakfast in the Classroom and traditional breakfast. Schools could potentially increase efforts to garner support and feedback from teachers to create buy-in and identify best practices. Future research could focus on identifying the effect that the School Breakfast Program model has on teachers' perceptions as well as confirming results with a larger and more diverse population.
Factors Influencing Fluid Milk Waste in a Breakfast in the Classroom School Breakfast Program
Objective: To determine predictors of fluid milk waste in a Breakfast in the Classroom School Breakfast Program. Design: Cross‐sectional with 3 repeated measures/classroom. Setting: Elementary schools in a medium‐sized, low‐income, urban school district. Participants: Twenty third‐ through fourth‐grade classrooms across 6 schools. Main Outcomes: Dependent variables include percentage of total and served milk wasted. Independent variables included observed daily menu offerings, program factors, and teacher and student behavior. Analysis: Descriptive statistics were used to characterize variables across classrooms and schools. Multilevel mixed‐effects models were used to test associations between predictors and outcomes of interest. P ≤ .05 was considered statistically significant. Results: Total milk waste increased 12% when juice was offered and 3% for each additional carton of unserved milk. Teacher encouragement to take and/or consume breakfast was associated with a 5% and 9% increase in total and served milk waste, respectively. When students were engaged in other activities in addition to eating breakfast, total milk waste decreased 10%. Conclusions and Implications: Beverage offerings were predictive of greater total milk waste. Teacher and student behavior also appeared to influence milk consumption. Findings suggest that specific changes to School Breakfast Program implementation policies and practices could have an important role in waste mitigation.
The New ‘U’
Today's talk about tenure must be framed within broader discussions about the role of the university. Our university system is now over one hundred years old, the “Old-Time College” is gone, the “cold war” university is no longer viable, and the foundations of the modern “multiversity” are cracking, so it is time to talk about change. But change is not necessarily reform, and resisting change probably will not keep things the way they are, so academics must understand the forces reshaping the university. Whenever I listen to colleagues defend the status quo by saying that the United States has a university system that is the envy of the world, I hear echoes of the Detroit automobile industry's casual dismissal of foreign competitors in the early 1960s. The decision not to change did not preserve the auto industry, and it is unlikely to preserve public universities as we know them. The current debates about tenure began with ideological attacks on “tenured radicals” who used their secure jobs to subvert conservative cultural values. The attack on tenure gathered steam as fiscal hawks in financially-strapped states looked for ways to save money and found huge state university systems with budgets to match. When asked why he robbed banks, the legendary Willie Sutton replied, “Because that's where the money is.” When asked why they are robbing tenure, legislators, regents, and administrators reply, “Because that's where the money is.” Personnel costs are a large share of university budgets and tenure ties the hands of administrators and legislators accustomed to using purse strings to control universities.