Faced with a budget crisis that had to be resolved this week by cutting $170 million in state spending, lawmakers nevertheless did something extraordinary: They passed an expansion of the free school breakfast program.

They did it because they understand that Mainers, including many children, are hungry. Late last year, the federal government reported that Maine's hunger rate had increased by 40 percent since it was last measured during the period 2001-2003 -- the biggest increase of any state in the nation. Between 2001-2003, 9.2 percent of Maine households experienced hunger; during the 2004-2006 period, that number jumped to 12.9 percent. That's 168,000 Maine people who are hungry.

But lawmakers didn't even need those formal statistics to prod them to action. They could have asked almost any teacher in the state to recount what they see every day in their classrooms: hungry kids who can't learn.

Senate Majority Leader Libby Mitchell, D-Vassalboro, was the bill's sponsor. She told a legislative committee that she was "shamed into taking this up again when the Kennebec Journal did a series on hunger in Maine." (Mitchell worked on school lunch issues in the 1970s.) The bill was co-sponsored by local Republican lawmaker, Rep. Pat Flood of Winthrop, and a bipartisan group of legislators from across Maine.

Expanding school breakfast in Maine was indeed one of our recommendations, made at the conclusion of our seven-part series on hunger that was published this summer in the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel, "For I was hungry." We made the recommendation after our investigation found that despite rapidly growing numbers of hungry children in the state and the availability of federal funds to pay for school breakfast programs, not all the state's schools offered breakfast and only 42 percent of those Maine students who are eligible for it actually get the meal in school.

The federal government subsidizes the full cost of a breakfast for children of families in severe need and a portion of the cost for children in families with slightly higher income. The latter group are children eligible for the so-called reduced price breakfast, which in Maine costs 30 cents.

These days, if you've got a few kids, a big heating bill, a gas guzzler that takes a punishing amount of fuel to fill up and one of Maine's far-too-common low-wage jobs, even affording that 30 cents a day can prove difficult.

Legislators understand that. So the measure passed earlier this week means the state will pay the 30 cents, thus providing free breakfast for 3,400 Maine schoolchildren at schools that already offer a breakfast program. It's a far cry from the original bill, which mandated that all Maine schools must offer a breakfast program and appropriated the funds to give breakfast at no cost to the more than 18,000 children who are eligible for a reduced price breakfast.

But the price tag on the bill was $1.5 million. In a context of severe budget cutbacks, that goal was simply not possible. Mitchell's stroke of genius was to ask that the funding for the breakfast bill come not out of the state budget but out of the state's tobacco settlement money, which this year had an unexpected surplus of millions of dollars. That fund is jealously guarded by the original group of organizations and causes which it is legally bound to support, but they eventually supported expanding their scope to include school breakfast.

Throughout weeks of agonized budget negotiations, in which programs for the poor were being cut right and left, the bill's backers -- both Democratic and Republican -- remained steady in their support. Certainly, in the face of economic reality they had to lower their sights -- the version that passed will cost a little more than $200,000. But the fact remains that, as one Statehouse veteran put it, expansion of eligibility for free school breakfast "was tried a hundred times in the past, and to no avail."

This time, they did it.

There's a long way to go before Maine's hungry families get the food they need. But as noted anti-hunger activist J. Larry Brown told an Augusta conference recently, conquering hunger cannot be the work of only the charitable, of the thousands of food pantry volunteers and donors who have undertaken to feed this country's hungry.

Lawmakers made an important statement this week when they voted to feed breakfast to more Maine children: The welfare of these children is important to all of us, and we will not leave to chance or charity whether they get the food they need. We commend lawmakers for their wisdom, for their hard work -- and for the political savvy that allowed them to accomplish what many before now have found impossible to do.