NC governor Roy Cooper and his wife visited Riverside High School

By Zoe Jones

According to senior Sena Zadeh, Governor Roy Cooper rocks.

Zadeh met Cooper on Friday, September 8 when he visited Riverside to promoting to expand No Kid Hungry (NKH), an organization working to provide kids in need with healthy food and give their parents resources to make nutritious meals for their children.

“We talked about why I like engineering and why I decided to go into the engineering department,” said Zadeh.

While many schools offer free breakfast, Riverside’s program is unique because of how many students it provides breakfast for on a daily basis.

“Governor Cooper and First Lady Kristin Cooper visited Riverside to observe how Durham Public Schools universal free breakfast program works in a comprehensive high school,” said principal Tonya Williams.

“Statistics show young people who eat breakfast do better on tests,” said Cooper. “They are more focused, and they perform better. For kids who don’t eat breakfast at home, when they arrive at school it’s the perfect time to eat breakfast.”

Studies have shown that children who eat breakfast at school actually do better than children who eat breakfast at home, or don’t eat breakfast at all. According to the Food Research and Action Center, students who eat breakfast perform 17.5% better on standardized math tests and attend 1.5 more days of school per year.

This has long-term effects, as children who attend class more recently are more likely to graduate and make more money than high school dropouts, according to nohungrykidnc.org.

Cooper spoke to the cafeteria staff and students about the importance of eating a healthy breakfast. He also got a chance to meet with engineering students.

“The wide array of opportunities and careers for engineering students is amazing,” said Cooper.

“He mostly talked about how excited he was about how many females were there,” said sophomore Haley Carpenter. “He said we should stick with it because there are good jobs out there and the engineering field needs more women.”

Two years from now, Cooper hopes North Carolina will be top ten in the nation for education.

“I want to invest in early childhood education because kids who are in school before pre kindergarten perform better,” said Cooper. “I also want to increase teacher pay.”