“A six-year-old that’s hungry is not a pretty picture.”

Pat Horstead’s observation, which creates the disturbing image of childhood cuteness distorted by want, came Wednesday in a small cupboard of an office in Surrey’s Georges Vanier elementary in the heart of Whalley.

Horstead, an assistant superintendent for Surrey School District, was explaining why the district was seeking the help of The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund Adopt-a-School Campaign to help feed the youngest of children attending eight of the district’s 120 schools.

It was an aside that reduced a whole page of Charles Dickens’s famous parable, A Christmas Carol, to this : If for nothing more than their own protection, (the well-fed) should alleviate hunger.

This message comes as the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals to Scrooge – the epitome of society’s indifference to those in need – two young children whom had formerly been hidden under his robes, a boy and girl, “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish …”

“This boy is Ignorance, this girl is Want. Beware them both….”

Dickens was drawing a straight line between childhood hunger, deprivation and lack of education to future social disorder and crime.

One hundred and sixty-eight years later, Horstead does the same.

“If you like, you can call the breakfast program a gang reduction strategy,” she said.

It was introduced at the tail end of the last school year and then again in October for eight inner city elementary schools suffering chronic absenteeism rates in their kindergarten to Grade 3 classes.

All have 20 per cent of students missing 10 per cent or more of classes, a threshold that portends major problems, said Merlin Chatwin, manager for Surrey’s community schools partnership.

“Research shows that once you hit that 10-per-cent mark it affects your ability to be successful as a student and it affects the ability of the rest of the class, too, as teachers have to keep going back to catch you up,” said Chatwin.

There are a number of ad hoc breakfast programs for hungry students organized by teachers and principals throughout the inner city areas of Metro Vancouver, most spurred by the sort of reaction that sends people into burning buildings.

But Horstead’s was more cerebral than emotional.

In a rare example of hard-nosed honesty – given how the subject can be milked – Horstead said it wasn’t concern with children having no breakfast that moved her to act.

“My primary teachers kept coming to me saying, ‘These kids aren’t learning to read and it’s frustrating because they don’t get here until 10 and if they got here during instruction [that occurs primarily in the morning] they’d be okay readers.’ ” “So the impetus for this program [Attendance Matters] was not really to feed kids but to ensure they got the literacy they needed.”

Breakfast served at 8 a.m. is the bait to entice them into school.

It does, of course, have the coincidental benefit of now feeding those who did come to school on time but hungry.

Georges Vanier principal Antonio Vendramin said Attendance Matters is designed to remove the hurdles that keep young children away from school or prevent them from learning due to tiredness or hunger.