KEY POINTS:
The school closest to Auckland's so-called "dead-end street", McGehan Close, says it does not want the free lunch and breakfast programme offered to it by National Party leader John Key.
Wesley Primary School principal Rae Parkin is angry at Mr Key's announcement on Saturday that he had brokered a deal with Te Atatu cereal maker Tasti Products to provide food to hungry children at her school.
"We don't have a breakfast programme here. We don't have a lunch programme here. There's no need for it in this school," she said.
But Mr Key hit back, accusing her of buckling to Labour Party pressure.
A charity that gives food to 31 low-decile schools, KidsCan, will meet Mr Key next Monday to pass on research it has done in more than 100 schools showing the need for a "discreet" food programme for the hungry.
Mr Key visited the area on Saturday after describing McGehan Close last week as a street where residents were "terrorised by youth gangs".
"These streets have become dead ends for those who live in them," he said.
Three-quarters of the 212 pupils at the decile-1 Wesley School are Pacific Islanders, and the rest are mainly Maori or immigrants from Asia and Africa. Only 2 per cent are New Zealand European.
Mrs Parkin said some children did come to school hungry, but she had also seen hungry children in her previous school, which was rated decile 8, near the top of the 10-point scale.
"We don't have large numbers of children without food," she said.
Wesley Primary was part of the Government's Fruit in Schools programme, which provides fresh fruit daily to all decile-1 schools. She said that programme was "fantastic", but she did not want her pupils' parents to think she felt they did not feed their children properly.
Mrs Parkin said Mr Key phoned her on Friday and said he had a contact at Tasti Products who was willing to offer food.
"The upshot was he said he could give me muesli bars. I have to say that when I talked to a dental therapist about it, she threw up her hands in horror," she said.
"He never discussed a free lunch and breakfast programme. I just thought he was getting us a few free muesli bars and that was the end of it," Mrs Parkin said.
But Mr Key said that her comments yesterday were so different from what she told him on Friday that she must have come under political pressure.
He confirmed that he did not discuss a "free lunch and breakfast" programme. His press release on Saturday described it as "the first initiative in what will be a National Food in Schools programme".
Mrs Parkin denied that she had come under any political pressure on the issue.
Tasti Products marketing manager Adrian Cook said his company's owner, Simon Hall, rang Mr Key last week to offer help with any scheme to feed hungry schoolchildren. The firm makes Tasti Sunrise cereals, snack bars, nut bars, dried fruits and other products.
Mr Cook phoned Mrs Parkin after she rang the Herald yesterday and the pair agreed on a "one-off" donation of snack bars and cereals which will be available when children are hungry.
Meanwhile, KidsCan general manager Julie Helson said its "Food for Kids" programme was based on research showing that schemes offering breakfast cereals or toast did not help children in the long term because they depended on volunteer labour.
Her programme gives low-decile schools long-lasting, low-sugar food bars and fruit pottles which they can keep until these are needed.
The programme fed an average of 3000 children a week last term and is being expanded to 5000 children this year.
'Food For Kids'
* Feeds 3000 hungry children a week at 31 low-income schools.
* Provides long-lasting foods that don't depend on volunteer labour.
* Aims to be discreet and is not advertised to parents.
* Schools say it has improved children's concentration and behaviour.
* Kids showed an increase in self-esteem as they "now have food like everyone else".
Source: KidsCan Charitable Trust.
