With its entire student body back on school grounds, Broadford Secondary College has reopened its breakfast club to ensure students start the day off on the right foot.
After more than a year off, the school’s breakfast club is back as a community-building exercise within the school.
Student wellbeing co-ordinator Jason Gatt said students had felt isolated while learning from home and were detached from the school and each other.
“We thought we’d reintroduce this and just try and build the community within the school again. It is largely student-driven so it’s supervised by staff,” he said.
“We have VCAL students coming in at 7.45 in the morning cooking some toast, cutting up fruit, making Milos and then the students serve it to the student population and again, it just sort of builds that community within the school, students looking after students pretty much.”
Mr Gatt said it was also about ensuring students were able to get breakfast in the morning.
“Primarily, it’s just about making sure that they’ve got food in the morning and that they’re feeling good about school, feeling good about being here and go to class ready to learn and with a full stomach,” he said.
Year 12 VCAL student Rhiannon Brown said the VCAL students originally started a café that sold coffees to teachers with all profits going to Love In Action, before branching into the breakfast club.
“The breakfast club came about because in the mornings, some of the kids are coming in, because it’s a bit early, they were missing breakfast and they were hungry so we decided to open it back up and then get it running again so kids could have some free breakfast,” she said.
“I feel like a lot of them are a bit happier, they’re not as grumpy in the mornings. I know that other kids are a bit nervous to come up but once they do start getting some food, they’re happy and they’ll talk to you and that’s really great.”
The program is partly funded by the school, with donations of bread and spreads coming from Broadford resident Tony Hibbert and more to come from the town’s IGA supermarket every week.
“We’re a school that’s really focused on looking after our kids and we just see this as one way of being able to demonstrate that,” Mr Gatt said.
