SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Funding for a popular school food program isn't being renewed next year, and that'll be a huge blow to schools across the territory, said Paige Saunders of the Food First Foundation.

"You're going to have a lot of hungry, disruptive children, who can't concentrate because their stomachs are growling," he said.

Saunders estimates that most of the students in Yellowknife have eaten food provided by his program at one point or another.

"There's no way of knowing how many mouths the food fed," he added. "My guess would be the vast majority of students in Yellowknife have consumed food from our program."

Even if there is not a free meal program at a school, Saunders has distributed money to every school in Yellowknife, he said.

Teachers were given the Food First grant and could use it as they saw fit.

"In Yellowknife, they might be spending it on things parents might not notice, like a cooking class," Saunders said.

Last year, the Department of Education, Culture, and Employment allocated $400,000 to the foundation on a trial basis for their Healthy Food for Learning grant. The money was given to teachers to buy healthy food and snacks for children in schools.

Metro Huculak, superintendent of Yk Education District No. 1, said the need for free food for students in Yellowknife is centred mainly on Mildred Hall School and Kaw Tay Whee School in Dettah, where the need is greater.

He said students outside of Yellowknife will feel the loss of funding the most.

"It's the communities basically, that will suffer," he said.

Huculak said he will continue looking for more funding to keep the lunch program going at the schools that need it the most.

"You always have to adapt, because sometimes things need to get cut," he added.

"There are a significant proportion of children that come to school that haven't been fed or don't have food for their school day," said Joyce Caines, nutrition education co-ordinator for Together for Healthy Learning, a diabetes prevention program that serves the entire territory.

Her office is based in Mildred Hall School, and every day, she notices the difference in the students when they have had enough to eat.

"It just helps them be more attentive and able to concentrate, because they're growing as well as learning," she said.

Caines also believes that the children are less irritable when they've had enough to eat. Not only does it help them learn, it also helps them socialize with their peers and teachers.

So far, Mildred Hall does not have a plan for the upcoming year, but with one less food program, Caines is not sure what they are going to do in September.

"I am concerned about how they would sustain some of the breakfast and lunch programs," she said.

The smell of chicken soup with rice and sausage wafted through the halls of Mildred Hall elementary school as Heather Dolan prepared lunch for a group of about 40 students. She is an educational assistant and organizes the free lunch program at Mildred Hall.

Even though the funding for the program from the Food First Foundation has been discontinued, Dolan remains committed to bringing a hot lunch to her kids.

"We'll find money somehow, we hope," she said. "We still have to feed them some way."

Frame Lake MLA Wendy Bisaro disagrees with Education Minister Jackson Lafferty's decision to keep Food First out of the 2011/12 budget.

"The minister will say there are other programs available," she said. "Food First was a targeted nutrition campaign, and they were certainly doing a lot of education."

Dan Daniels, the deputy minister of education, said funding for Food First was part of a one-year project.

"The funding was only in place for one year," he said.

He encouraged teachers to seek out other sources of funding for their school lunch programs like the Aboriginal Student Achievement Initiative, which has a budget of $230,000 in the next fiscal year.

This past school year, Mildred Hall School participated in both national and territorial lunch and breakfast programs. Food First is a NWT program while Breakfast For Learning is a national program that serves the NWT as well.

"It really is disappointing. We share a common goal that we want to see kids well fed and well nourished," said Dana Britton, regional co-ordinator of Breakfast for Learning.

Her group supplies food to 47 of the 49 schools in the Northwest Territories alongside Food First.

Right now, she's not sure if Breakfast for Learning can pick up the slack after the cancellation of Food First's breakfast program because she collects donations solely from the private sector.

"It can be a volatile source of funding," she said.

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