Every weekday morning, half an hour before Healdsburg Elementary School TK-2 students walk through the door, retired TV personality Ross McGowan is there, prepping breakfast trays for 17 classes of kindergarten, first and second grades. As volunteers wheel trays of fruit, eggs, and other nutritious breakfast foods through classroom doors, the students greet them with a chorus of, “good morning, Morning Grumble!”
As the program enters its seventh year of feeding hungry HES students, Morning Grumble is looking for several new community members to come out and volunteer.
The Morning Grumble program, founded by McGowan in 2012, will start up again in the new school yea. McGowan leads a community volunteer force, dedicated to ensuring each student begins the day with a healthy, nutritious breakfast.
McGowan relocated full time to Healdsburg in 2009 after working for news channels in San Francisco. He founded the Morning Grumble program after retiring from a nearly 50-year career in broadcast journalism.
“I had done a lot of interviews about kids going to school without having anything to eat,” he said. “It was always in the back of my mind.”
When Morning Grumble began in 2012, over half the students at HES qualified for free or reduced meals. But, according to McGowan, only about 60 students out of the 200 or so that qualified were showing up for school breakfasts.
“School started at 8, but breakfast was served at 7:30, and for whatever reason parents just weren’t getting their kids there,” said McGowan. “So that meant, unless they were eating at home, many of the kids weren’t eating anything in the morning.”
Morning Grumble ensures students have an opportunity to eat in the mornings by serving food about half an hour after class has begun. Additionally, whether or not they qualify for free or reduced lunches, every student gets food through Morning Grumble. McGowan believes this greatly reduces the stigma for rhose who need the school subsidized food programs.
“I think that’s one of the greatest benefits of the program, everybody’s treated the same,” he said. “Everybody’s fed, they’re sitting at their desk laughing and scratching and just being kids.”
Both HES faculty and the Healdsburg community have responded positively. According to McGowan, teachers were seeing the benefits of Morning Grumble within the first week.
“[Principal] Stephanie Feith told me that almost from the beginning of the program, kids were no longer arriving in the office saying they were hungry, that their stomachs hurt, they didn’t feel good,” said McGowan. “Teachers weren’t hearing that anymore.”
The Morning Grumble volunteer force has also grown considerably over the last seven school years. Many of the volunteers, like McGowan, are retirees looking for a meaningful way to give back to their community. Some even have grandchildren who attend HES. One of the volunteers is a former Healdsburg Elementary principal. While the program is looking for seven or eight new volunteers for the school year, many members of the current team have been coming back year after year.
“It’s amazing how they come back. It’s just like being around friends,” said McGowan. “We laugh a lot, and in the past year there have been days where it’s become really important for the volunteers to be with their people — folks they didn’t even know when they started.”
“What I’ve heard again and again from the volunteers is that the thing they love most is when the carts roll up to the door and the kids all yell in unison, ‘good morning, Morning Grumble!’” said McGowan. “It sounds like a small thing, but it means a lot.”
