"Last week at Hillcrest Elementary near Austin, more than a hundred children huddled in the early evening around steaming plates of rice, baked beans with ham, and plums all prepared from scratch.
Nearby there were board games, educational activities, and a host of tutors ready to help them with their daily homework. The program, one of hundreds like it supplied by Texas food banks, is called Kids Café. Its value is inestimable.
'I don’t know what we would do without it,' said Sara Guerra, Hillcrest’s principal.
Nearby Dalia, age 10, agreed: 'If you don’t have food to help you think, then you will fall asleep a lot, and you won’t learn that much.'
Another child, Nadia, 9, looked at her plate and shrugged: 'It’s my dinner because sometimes we don’t have food in the house.'
Down the road, the Texas legislature had just learned it was facing a budget shortfall of $9.1 billion for the biennium."
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