Austin Public Schools students will hopefully do more than just feed their minds in the mornings.

District officials are partnering with Hunger-Free Minnesota, a collaboration of health, food, and local organizations across the state, to significantly increase the amount of students eating breakfast in Austin.

“We’re really going to work on increasing our breakfast participation,” said Mary Weikum, food and nutritional services director. “That’s really the direction we are taking.”

Austin is one of five districts that will work closely with Hunger-Free Minnesota to track how many students eat breakfast and find ways to boost those numbers. The district already made several changes in response to a Hormel Foods Corp. study done last spring at Neveln Elementary School. Researchers looked at what students ate during school breakfast for multiple days and tracked eating patterns over a two week period. In addition, students answered surveys to show what they ate for breakfast.

Hormel researchers found 14 percent of first-grade students skipped breakfast every day, while only 18 percent had milk with their breakfast.

The changes are already happening, as district officials changed many breakfast offerings to what Weikum calls “grab and go,” where students can take food to the classroom and not just sit down for their meals. District officials and researchers found more students are willing to eat breakfast if they can take the meal with them, Weikum said. Austin schools also have chocolate milk again, as researchers found students would take white milk during breakfast at Neveln but didn’t always drink it.

“We believe the benefit of the protein outweighs the extra sugar in chocolate milk,” Weikum said.

There are already results to report. Weikum told the Austin Public Schools board last month more than three times the amount of Sumner Elementary School students are eating breakfast this year, in part due to Sumner’s decision to serve breakfast in the classroom. And the district received $1,000 grants last week to boost breakfast participation by at least 25 percent this year in Southgate and Banfield Elementary Schools. That 25 percent goal is a district-wide target after school officials found free-and-reduced lunch students weren’t taking advantage of free breakfasts.

“If every student who had free-and-reduced lunch ate breakfast last year, we would have served hundreds of thousands of more breakfasts,” Weikum said.