Title: ‘There Isn't Enough Bacon': Engaging High School Students in the Development of Communication Efforts to Increase School Breakfast Participation

Background: For adolescents, breakfast can improve academic performance, classroom behavior and help manage weight-- but many teenagers in the United States either do not eat breakfast or do not have an adequately nutritious breakfast. School breakfast programs have the potential to fill this gap, especially for lower-income families, by offering a nutritious and affordable breakfast. Nevertheless, the national school breakfast participation rate is just one-third that of the national school lunch program; the state of Iowa ranks a dismal 47^th in the nation for school breakfast participation.

Program background: A joint effort between the Iowa Department of Education’s Team Nutrition Program and the University of Iowa, Public Policy Center and College of Public Health was launched to engage high school students in developing a campaign to encourage their peers to participate in school breakfast.

Evaluation Methods and Results: This presentation will outline the participatory process informed by Theory of Active Involvement (Greene, 2013), by which a campaign was developed to encourage high school students to participate in school breakfast. Using a participatory social marketing process over the course of a semester, high school students at three Iowa high schools both conducted and participated in formative research to ultimately develop the campaign theme and messages. The students took part in a concept mapping exercise in order to organize their ideas surrounding school breakfast. The results of the concept mapping exercise and additional discussions between the University of Iowa team and the school groups revealed that the majority of the students had no experience with eating school breakfast; in fact, many did not even know that schools served breakfast onsite. Through concept mapping, students identified environmental barriers to participation, such as time and the style by which breakfast was served. Perceived benefits to school breakfast included convenience and socializing. The groups also identified potential methods to motivate their peers, including rewards program and better parking spots.

Conclusions: The student groups from these high schools recognized that messages would not be sufficient to improve breakfast participation, because many environmental factors stood in the way as significant barriers to participation. Using social marketing principles, students developed a toolkit for food service directors to use when designing, implementing, and promoting school breakfast. As part of the toolkit, a Twitter campaign—the preferred social medium most often cited by students-- was designed to inform, entertain and encourage fellow students to participate in school breakfast.  Students also developed a guide of best practices and policies to encourage school administrators and school food service directors to change how they implement the school breakfast program.

Implications for research and/or practice: High school students are able to articulate the need for individual and environmental factors to be addressed in order to create behavior change. Participatory models and methods such as the Theory of Active Involvement and concept mapping are useful in guiding students. Campaigns