Impacto da merenda regionalizada no desempenho escolar em alunos de duas escolas da rede municipal de Manaus/AM

Abstract

Brazil Federal Law N° 11.947/2009 establishes that a minimum of 30% on the total financial resources used for buying food served as school meal, must be purchased directly from family farmers and rural organizations or their family entrepreneurs. This research was mainly aimed to evaluate the impact of a regionalized school meal regarding school performance, acceptance of the menu and cost comparisons. This assay was conducted in two public county schools with similar profile, both located in the East Zone of Manaus, capital of the State of Amazonas, Brazil. Five hundred and twenty-six children were allowed by their parents to participate in this study, with ages varying from seven to eleven years old. The school level known as primary school, varied from first to fifth grade. In School A, no intervention on the conventional menu was carried. In School B, a new menu with regional food was offered in substitution to the conventional one. As the Law determines, part of industrialized food was substituted by regional products, obtained directly from family agriculture, entrepreneurs and cooperatives. There were no differences of acceptance between Schools A (0,59) and B (0,58) before this changes. However, after introducing the new regionalized menu in School B, acceptance changed from 0,58 to 0,92 as observed in answers 4 (like) and 5 (like very much) in the application. Total cost of each serving was also compared and regional menu meal was 17.57% cheaper when compared to conventional. Academic performance of students from both schools in Portuguese Language and Mathematics subjects, show that School A had improvement for Portuguese and Mathematics subjects in almost every grades except Mathematics in first grade and Portuguese Language in fourth grade. No improvement was observed in the performance of students from School B. For this, we concluded that other factors but type of meal, interfere in student performance. We believe that school performance depends of many other factors, different of meal menu. It is advisable in the future a new research to expand the time of observation in school performance, considering significant increase in acceptance and low financial cost of regionalized meals.