Education Week - June 9, 2021 - 13

May 7 to make free meals universal.
The Universal School Meals Program
Act
of
2021-cosponsored
by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Rep.
Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Sen. Kirsten
Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Rep. Gwen
Moore, D-Wis.-would allow schools
to provide free breakfast, lunch, and
dinner to every student, regardless of
family income.
" While the extension of these
short-term waivers will come as a
relief to many families, without a
permanent solution to provide free
meals to all students, schools will
eventually have to revert to the complicated
myriad of paperwork and
programs-where only some kids get
to eat for free, " the lawmakers wrote
in a bill summary.
Meal programs can face
tricky budget issues
When he ran for president, SandPam
Kissell, a food service worker at Bellows Falls Union High School in Westminster, Vt., wraps meals to be handed
out to students as part of the school district's summer meals program.
The Pandemic Brought
Universal Free School Meals.
Will They Be Here to Stay?
By Evie Blad
Relaxed rules during the COVID-19
pandemic have given many Americans
a glimpse of a policy child hunger
organizations have supported for
years: universal free school meals.
Now those same advocates, and
some Democratic lawmakers, hope
to make free meals for all students
permanent.
" Children may not understand
when their parents can't pay the light
bill, but they sure understand when
there is no food, " said Suzanne Morales,
the director of nutrition services
at the Placentia-Yorba Linda
Unified School District, a 25,000-student
school system in Orange County,
Calif.
Even as schools served fewer
meals in the past year, they served
almost all of them at no cost.
Efforts to extend free meals
through legislation are supported by
groups like national teachers' unions
and the School Nutrition Association,
which represents school food
directors around the country. Making
free school lunches universal
would not only help poor children,
the organization says; it would also
eliminate the bureaucratic churn
of helping newly eligible families
enroll
in reduced-price meal programs,
concerns about unpaid meal
debt from individual students, and
the stigma that stops some students
from eating subsidized school food.
But some congressional Republicans
argue that existing school nutrition
rules are already too lenient.
And some Democrats, including
President Joe Biden, have called for
a more-targeted approach to feeding
students in high-poverty schools.
Pandemic shows benefits
of free school meals
A menu of federal rules waivers
have given school nutrition programs
permission to provide meals
on a grab-and-go basis when schools
were in remote learning mode. That
allowed them to offer takeout containers
to all children, even those
who didn't attend school in a particular
building.
Some districts even used school
buses to deliver meals to remote
neighborhoods.
When Indiana schools closed in
March 2020, Warrick County schools
" immediately went into five days a
week of hot food, grab-and-go, " said
Shenae Rowe, the nutrition director.
" It gave them a little bit of normalcy
that everyone wanted so badly. "
Those federal waivers have been
extended several times. They are
currently set to expire in June 2022,
which has allowed schools to serve
free meals in classrooms and cafeterias
as they return to in-person learning
and will continue to allow them
that flexibility through the 2021-22
school year.
" For a district like ours, we have
seen a huge impact on how the free
meals have benefited our students, "
said Rowe, who said teachers have
noted fewer issues with student behavior
as more kids eat at school. " I
don't think people realized how essential
our meals were until the pandemic
happened. "
But comparing free meals during
the pandemic to a hypothetical " normal "
year of universal free meals is a
bit like comparing apples to oranges,
school nutrition directors acknowledged.
To-go
items that didn't require refrigeration
didn't replicate the quality
of the hot, from-scratch meals
many schools have worked hard to
develop, said Morales, of California.
Employees in her district planned
meals " by prayer, " dealing with
pandemic-related shortages of key
ingredients, staffing challenges, and
increased costs associated with virus
precautions.
And participation was inconsistent,
even dropping below previous
years'
back and forth between remote and
in-person learning and dealt with logistical
hurdles, like quarantines and
a lack of transportation to meal sites.
Legislation would expand
free school meals
Schools served about 191 million
lunches in February 2021, compared
to about 490 million lunches in February
2020, according to the most
recent federal data.
But a larger percentage of those
meals were free-90 percent in 2021
compared to 68 percent in 2020-as
schools took advantage of the federal
waivers.
Despite those contrasts, a group of
Democratic lawmakers mentioned
the success of pandemic waivers
when they introduced a new effort
levels, as children switched
ers promoted earlier versions of the
bill as Americans responded to viral
stories of " lunch shaming, " a term
that refers to schools refusing to
serve students hot meals if they are
overdrawn on their accounts.
School nutrition providers say
that, because their budgets operate
on narrow margins and separately
from their districts, they are often put
in a tight spot when too many paying
students are past due on their meal
tabs, sometimes because of missed
communications with families or
other obstacles not necessarily related
to income. In rare cases, districts
have resorted to calling collection
agencies or withholding diplomas
until families pay their bills. That has
led to state-level measures in recent
years to prohibit such practices.
" Every child deserves a quality education
free of hunger, " Sanders said
in a statement when he announced
the bill. " What we've seen during
this pandemic is that a universal approach
to school meals works. We
cannot go backwards. "
The universal meals bill would
prohibit participating schools from
denying any child a lunch or a breakfast
and it would reimburse " delinquent
school meal debt. " It would
also increase the federal reimbursement
for meals.
It's not clear how much the bill
would cost, and the Congressional
Budget Office has not calculated
an estimate. The U.S. Department
of Agriculture is projected to spend
about $10.4 billion on the National
School Lunch Program and about
$4.2 billion on the school breakfast
program this fiscal year.
Even if all meals are free, it's unlikely
that all students will participate,
school nutrition directors said.
About 52 percent of U.S. students
were eligible for free and reduced-price
meals in 2019, according
to the most recent federal data. Students
with higher family incomes eat
school meals at lower rates, and that's
been true even during the pandemic,
directors told Education Week. But allowing
students to eat without enrolling
in free programs would take away
a huge hurdle, especially for families
facing a sudden loss of income or for
undocumented immigrant families
who may be reluctant to sign up for
public benefits, they said.
" There's always been a stigma
with school lunch, " said Rowe, of
Indiana. " People think it's more for
the needy kids, and that's just not the
case at all. "
Expanded meal programs
were already under scrutiny
Some high-poverty schools already
served universal free meals,
even before the pandemic, through
a program created by the Healthy,
Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.
The Community Eligibility Provision
allows a school or a cluster of
schools within the same district to
serve free meals to all students if at
least 40 percent of their enrollment
is made up of " identified students, "
who live in households that participate
in other federal income-based
programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program.
Even as he proposes ambitious
expansions of the social safety net,
President Biden has stopped short
of calling for universal free school
meals. Instead, his American Families
Plan would expand Community
Eligibility through a $17 billion effort
to increase reimbursement rates for
participating schools and by lowering
the qualifying threshold for elementary
schools from 40 percent
to 25 percent of identified students.
The White House estimates the plan
would extend free meals to an additional
9.3 million children.
" Targeting elementary students
will drive better long-term health
outcomes by ensuring low-income
children are receiving nutritious
meals at an early age, " the White
House plan says.
But congressional Republicans
have panned Biden's broad spending
programs, and the tax increases on
higher income earners it would take
to pay for them. They have previously
attempted to tighten restrictions
on school meal participation, rather
than expanding them.
Groups like
the conservative
Heritage Foundation have said free
school meals aren't targeted enough.
They've criticized federal rules that
allow districts to combine high-poverty
and low-poverty schools in clusters,
qualifying them for Community
Eligibility by averaging their enrollment
between buildings.
" Giving welfare to students who
don't need it deprives them of nothing, "
the organization said in a May
14 commentary. " It does, however,
needlessly expand a notoriously
wasteful program while allowing
federal officials to abdicate their responsibility
to keep track of which
students need assistance. "
Groups like the School Nutrition
Association have equated providing
free meals to providing free textbooks
so students can learn.
" Time and time again we hear
about kids being sent to the nurse's
office because they are actually
hungry, " said Diane Pratt-Heavner,
spokesperson for the School Nutrition
Association. " When the meals
are all free, there's no shame in taking
one. "
EDUCATION WEEK | June 9, 2021 | www.edweek.org | 13
Kristopher Radder/The Brattleboro Reformer via AP

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Education Week - June 9, 2021

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