What Could a Project Bread School Breakfast Grant Do for Your School?
Project Bread
Every school community has different opportunities when it comes to school breakfast. Maybe students need more time to eat. Maybe breakfast needs to be more convenient. Maybe you’re looking for new ways to get students excited about the food you serve.
For Dedham Public Schools and Triton Regional School District, Project Bread school breakfast grants helped turn those opportunities into action. The results show what’s possible when schools have the resources and partnership to try something new.
Dedham Public Schools
Making Breakfast More Appealing and Accessible
When Jeanne Johnson, School Nutrition Director for Dedham Public Schools, looked at the district’s breakfast program, she saw an opportunity to make it easier and more exciting for students to participate.
With support from a Project Bread grant, Dedham revamped and expanded breakfast at three schools. At Dedham High School, the district added an hour of cafeteria breakfast service after the bell, with a Grab & Go option, and introduced fresh, customizable breakfast choices.
One new offering quickly became a student favorite: an acai bowl bar. Students started with blended acai and customized their bowls with toppings like mango, blackberries, granola, mini pancakes, and honey.
The result? Breakfast participation at Dedham High School increased by 25%.
“Seeing students embrace a healthy new food concept and become excited about it was incredibly rewarding,” said Jeanne. “It reinforced the importance of exposing students to fresh, homemade, and customizable breakfast options that help build lifelong healthy eating habits.”
Dedham’s experience shows that relatively simple changes—more time, more convenience, and food students are excited to eat—can make a measurable difference.
Triton School District
Removing Barriers to Access
At Triton Regional School District, the path to boosting breakfast participation required a new approach.
Triton High School already had a successful Breakfast After the Bell program, with 4-5 breakfast carts making it easy for students to participate, and the district wanted to bring that success to the middle school. With support from a Project Bread grant, they added a breakfast cart on the third floor, extending access through homeroom, passing periods, and first period.
Sarah Littmann, Director of Food and Nutrition Services at Triton Regional School District, also worked with administrators to remove a longstanding barrier: allowing students to eat breakfast in their classrooms.
Breakfast participation at Triton Middle School increased by 45% from October 2025 to May 2026.
The breakfast participation success also helped the district make a bigger change. After seeing what was possible at the middle school, district administrators agreed to implement breakfast in the classroom at all schools to help support Breakfast after the Bell.
A powerful example of the program’s impact came from a student at the end of the school year. When students were asked to recognize a teacher or staff member who had made a difference in their lives, one student selected the cafeteria employee running the middle school’s new breakfast cart.
“With the Project Bread Breakfast After the Bell grant, we purchased baking smallwares and food prep equipment, which has allowed our staff to get creative in the kitchen, and we have really elevated our school breakfast menus. We are offering new scratch-made items like banana bread, apple pie coffee cake, breakfast quesadillas, muffins, pancake squares, and more, with the new recipes being developed by our staff. We really have reinvigorated school breakfast,” said Sarah. The numbers show that the kids are loving it, with participation getting a 10% boost across the district.
“Increasing access to breakfast while serving delicious and healthy options has made such an impact on children's lives,” she said.
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What Could Your District Try to Boost Breakfast Participation?
The experiences of Dedham and Triton demonstrate that there’s no single way to improve school breakfast and boost participation.
Project Bread provides individualized support to any school or district in Massachusetts looking to start a school breakfast program, change breakfast models, or increase participation in an existing program. A Project Bread grant can help schools explore the approach that makes the most sense for their students, whether that means extending service, creating Grab & Go options, introducing new and exciting menu options, adding a breakfast cart, or removing barriers that make it harder for students to participate.
For these districts, grant funding helped turn ideas into changes students could experience every day. The results were measurable. If a grant or funding is not what your school needs, you can still reach out at any time to cnop@projectbread.org for help with your school breakfast program.
If you see an opportunity to improve breakfast at your school, a Project Bread grant can help you make it happen. Our school breakfast grant application will open on September 28 for the 2026-2027 school year. Start thinking about what changes could make an impact at your school, and mark your calendar!