COLUMBIA — Poor South Carolina students who eat meals at school for a much-reduced cost would no longer pay anything under a Senate budget proposal.

Students who aren’t considered poor enough to eat for free pay 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch. Nearly 10,000 students statewide qualify for that rate, while 622,000 can eat for free.

The budget clause advocated by Sen. Katrina Shealy would ensure no student would need to scrounge up nickels and dimes to eat.

That 70 cents per day for students who eat both meals at school — $3.50 a week for Monday through Friday — probably seems insignificant for most, but for the families who qualify for that rate, it can be a big deal, said Shealy, who sits on Senate Finance and is chairwoman of the Senate Family and Veterans’ Services Committee.

Her proposal, sent to the Senate floor this week as part of Senate Finance’s budget package, is expected to cost the state less than $1.5 million in a $13.2 billion spending package. The sum could actually be much less, depending on how many eligible students sign up. If participation remains the same, covering the gap may cost $530,000, Shealy said.

“We waste that much money on much less important things,” she told the SC Daily Gazette.

The Lexington Republican hopes it’s a step toward free meals for all K-12 public school students.

“The only thing I could get was a bite out of the apple,” she said. “Next year, we can work on getting free lunches for everyone.”

She pre-filed legislation in November 2022 that would do that by requiring the state to reimburse school districts any costs not covered by the federal government. The bill has never received a hearing.

Fellow Republicans, notably Education Chairman Greg Hembree, had sticker shock at the predicted cost.

Offering universal meals at K-12 schools may cost , according to a March 2023 estimate by the state’s fiscal experts. But actual costs for that could also be much lower. A guestimate cited at a last August was $50 million to $60 million. Shealy thinks it would be closer to $40 million.

Whatever the true tally, Hembree said, that would pay for a lot of meals whose families don’t need the help.

“I don’t want to do welfare for families that don’t need it,” said the Little River Republican.

However, he said he can get on board with covering the reduced-price gap.

“This is such a small contribution, I don’t have a problem with that,” Hembree told the SC Daily Gazette.

A determines students’ eligibility for free and reduced-cost meals. For example, students in a family of three — whether a single mom with two children, or two parents with one child — can eat for free if their household income is less than $32,320. If their income is between that amount and $45,991, the children pay the reduced rate of 70 cents a day.

The vast majority of South Carolina’s K-12 public schools qualify for a that covers meal costs for all students without parental paperwork. Eligibility increased last fall as the federal government lowered the threshold for qualifying. Still, not all eligible schools in the state participate.

That’s because the federal government’s reimbursements don’t cover the cost of feeding every student, Hembree said.

A clause inserted in the state budget last year — which will roll over — was designed to increase participation. It requires local school boards to either participate where eligible or pass a resolution explaining to the public why they’re not.

The clause also bars so-called lunch shaming. Schools can’t deny meals or serve alternative meals — such as a cold peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a paper bag — to students with a lunch debt. They also can’t make the student do chores or extra work in exchange for meals or deny participation in any school event or field trip.

So, even for students who accrue debt because they can’t pay, there’s little real impact, Hembree said.

“We’ve done what we can do” on preventing children from being shamed, he told senators.

But Shealy said she still worries about schools holding the money over students’ heads to keep them from joining extracurriculars or walking at graduation. Removing the cost completely would make that a non-issue for students receiving reduced-cost meals, she said.

She plans to try again next year.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

School meals are critical to child health. Research has shown that than meals from other sources, such as meals brought from home.

A recent study that one of us conducted found the quality of school meals has steadily improved, especially since the 2010 strengthened nutrition standards for school meals. In fact, by 2017, another study found that school meals provided the of any major U.S. food source.

Many American families became familiar with universal free school meals during the COVID-19 pandemic. To ease the financial and logistical burdens of the pandemic on families and schools, the that allowed schools nationwide to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students. However, these by the 2022-23 school year.

Since that time, there has been a substantial increase in schools participating in the , a federal policy that allows schools in high poverty areas to provide free breakfast and lunch to all attending students. The policy became available as an option for low-income schools nationwide in 2014 and was part of the . By the 2022-23 school year, had adopted the Community Eligibility Provision, an increase of more than 20% over the prior year.

We are study the health effects of nutrition-related policies, particularly those that alleviate poverty. Our newly published research found that the Community Eligibility Provision was associated with a net .

Improving the health of American children

President Harry Truman in 1946, with the stated goal of protecting the health and well-being of American children. The program established permanent federal funding for school lunches, and participating schools were required to provide free or reduced-price lunches to children from qualifying households. Eligibility is based on federal poverty levels, both of which are .

In 1966, the piloted the , which provides free, reduced-price and full-price breakfasts to students. This program was later made permanent through an amendment in 1975.

The was piloted in several states beginning in 2011 and became an option for eligible schools nationwide beginning in 2014. It operates through the national school lunch and school breakfast programs and expands on these programs.

The policy allows all students in a school to receive free breakfast and lunch, rather than determine eligibility by individual households. Entire schools or school districts are eligible for free lunches if at least 40% of their students are directly certified to receive free meals, meaning their household participated in a means-based safety net program, such as the , or the child is identified as runaway, homeless, in foster care or enrolled in Head Start. Some states also .

The Community Eligibility Provision increases school meal participation by associated with receiving free meals, eliminating the need to complete and process applications and extending access to students in households with incomes above the eligibility threshold for free meals. As of 2023, the eligibility threshold for free meals is 130% of the federal poverty level, which amounts to US$39,000 for a family of four.

Universal free meals and obesity

We analyzed whether providing universal free meals at school through the Community Eligibility Provision was associated with lower childhood obesity before the COVID-19 pandemic.

To do this, we measured from 2013 to 2019 among 3,531 low-income California schools. We used over 3.5 million body mass index measurements of students in fifth, seventh and ninth grade that were taken annually and aggregated at the school level. To ensure rigorous results, we between schools that adopted the policy and eligible schools that did not. We also followed the same schools over time, comparing obesity prevalence before and after the policy.

We found that schools participating in the Community Eligibility Provision had a in obesity prevalence compared with eligible schools that did not participate in the provision. Although our findings are modest, even small improvements in obesity levels are notable because effective strategies to reduce obesity at a population level . Additionally, because obesity racially and ethnically marginalized and low-income children, this policy could contribute to reducing health disparities.

The Community Eligibility Provision likely reduces obesity prevalence by substituting up to half of a child’s weekly diet with healthier options and simultaneously for low-to-middle-income families. Families receiving free breakfast and lunch save approximately $4.70 per day per child, or $850 per year. For low-income families, particularly those with multiple school-age children, this could result in meaningful savings that families can use for other health-promoting goods or services.

Expanding access to school meals

Childhood obesity the past several decades. Obesity often to a range of .

Growing research is showing the benefits of universal free school meals for the health and well-being of children. Along with our study of California schools, other researchers have found an association between universal free school meals and reduced obesity in , and , as well as among and school districts in .

Studies have also linked the Community Eligibility Provision to and .

While our research observed a reduction in the prevalence of obesity among schools participating in the Community Eligibility Provision relative to schools that did not, obesity increased over time in both groups, with a greater increase among nonparticipating schools.

Universal free meals policies may slow the rise in childhood obesity rates, but they alone will not be sufficient to reverse these trends. Alongside universal free meals, identifying to reduce obesity among children is necessary to address this public health issue.

As of 2023, universal free school meals policies. States such as California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico have pledged to cover the difference between school meal expenditures and federal reimbursements. As more states adopt their own universal free meals policies, understanding their effects on child health and well-being, as well as barriers and supports to successfully implementing these programs, will be critical.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

This year 35 states will participate in a that will help low-income parents buy groceries for their children when free school meals are unavailable during the summer months.

But Texas, which , according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has opted not to join this national effort. If it had, qualifying families would have received $120 per child through a pre-loaded card for the three summer months. The USDA calculated that Texas is passing on a total of $450 million in federal tax dollars that would have gone to eligible families here.

The reason for the pass is simple, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. When the USDA notified HHSC officials of their new Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer, or EBT program on Dec. 29, that gave the nation’s second largest state only six months to get it up and running and that’s not enough time, said Tiffany Young, a spokesperson for the state agency.

Although the summer program would involve two other agencies as well – the Texas Education Agency and the Texas Department of Agriculture – HHSC would have to bear the brunt of the work because they would have to coordinate and direct the distribution of the preloaded cards to qualifying families.

Already on their plate is the cumbersome of Medicaid coverage. Since last April, the agency has removed more than 2 million Texans from the program since the federal government lifted continuous coverage rules during the pandemic, forcing those who still qualify for coverage to reapply. From HHSC’s perspective, launching an entirely new program wouldn’t be possible at this time.

Additionally, the USDA would only cover 50% of the administrative expenses for Summer EBT. It would be up to the state to cover the residual cost.

Young wrote that the HHSC, TDA and TEA have been in “active discussions” about each agencies’ responsibilities in accordance with Summer EBT.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture first piloted the summer program with Pandemic EBT, or P-EBT, during the 2019-2020 school year in all 50 states. P-EBT was created in response to children from low-income families who qualified for free and reduced-price school meals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Federal officials estimate 21 million children in 35 states, five U.S. territories and four tribes participating in the program would receive the extra money during the summer months.

Texas is one of 15 states that will not participate. Among the 15 is Alabama — opting out with similar rationale to Texas — attributing their reasoning to an insufficient amount of time to appropriate the funds necessary for the program.

, school lunch may be the only full meal they get each day. According to Feeding Texas, a nonprofit organization that supplies food banks across the state, one in five children are affected by food insecurity — defined as an insufficient amount or unreliable sources of food to sustain oneself.

The Texas Department of Agriculture administers the free and reduced meal program for students during the school year. Agriculture Commissioner said he understands the disappointment some families have about Texas’ decision not to participate this year. He said his agency would have assisted if the decision was made to participate.

“The problem we’re facing — and we face this at the TDA in our school meals program and our summer feeding programs — everything is so much more expensive,” Miller said. “An extra 40 dollars could have gone a long way to offset that.”

Every Texan petitioned alongside statewide and regional organizations for the program last November, to Cecile Young, executive commissioner of HHSC.

“Summer EBT is something that we have been advocating for for years, because we know how hard it is in a state as spread out as Texas to access enough food, to be able to afford enough food for their kids when school is closed,” Rachel Cooper told The Texas Tribune.

Though not as comprehensive as Summer EBT, food insecure children still have options for food assistance during the summer. Miller told the Tribune that “kids aren’t going to get fed any less” on account of the TDA’s expansion of their . Children 18 and under are eligible to receive a free meal at their meal sites across the state.

Parents can also find out if their child’s school district is one of many that provide free meals during the summer. National organizations, such as the YMCA and Boys & Girls Club, provide summer meal assistance at select locations.

Though it remains possible to secure a balanced meal without Summer EBT, Cooper believes it is still possible and necessary for Texas to join the program in 2025.

“Our kids need it,” Cooper said. “They deserve it, and we just need to do our part.”

Disclosure: Every Texan and Feeding Texas have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This article originally appeared in at .

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

A bill that would provide free meals for all public school students in Virginia passed the Senate Education and Health Committee Thursday.

“This is about making sure that every kid who goes to school gets fed — no questions asked,” said Sen. Danica Roem, D-Manassas, the patron for , earlier this month.

The proposal would cost over the next two years.

Some Republicans including Sen. Mark Peake, R-Lynchburg, balked at the cost.

“I just obviously do not want any child to go hungry and do not want any child who cannot afford a meal to go hungry, either breakfast or lunch, but I just think at this point, I’m not quite ready to say that the commonwealth is going to pay for breakfast and lunch for every child in the commonwealth when you got [wealthy] counties,” Peake said. “I just don’t see that we should take general fund dollars to pay for breakfast and lunch in some of the wealthiest counties in the commonwealth.”

Roem noted even Virginia’s wealthiest counties, such as Loudoun, have schools that qualify for federal school lunch programs and have significant school meal debt. Furthermore, she said, many families fall just outside the eligibility limit for free and reduced meals.

Catherine Ford, a lobbyist representing the School Nutrition Association of Virginia, contended the state should be putting funds toward universal meals.

“We believe that just like textbooks, just like school buses, just like desks, that meals should be provided to children at school,” Ford said.

Proposal

If passed, all public school divisions in Virginia would be required to make meals available for free to any student unless their parent had notified the school board to not do so.

The state would reimburse schools for each meal.

Currently, only schools that qualify for the federal Community Eligibility Provision can offer all students free meals. Schools qualify for the CEP if a certain percentage of their students are classified as low-income.

Previously the federal government set that threshold at 40%, but this September the U.S. Department of Agriculture lowered it to 25%, a change it said would “give states and schools greater flexibility to offer meals to all enrolled students at no cost when financially viable.”

Roem’s measure would expand free meals to even those schools that don’t qualify for the CEP.

The legislation would also require school boards to adopt policies to maximize their use of federal funds for free breakfast and lunch and create a workgroup to study the potential impact of offering guaranteed school meals.

A step beyond earlier legislation

Roem said this year’s proposal is an extension of she successfully carried that required divisions to apply to enroll any schools in CEP that qualified for it.

Generally, Roem said school breakfasts in Virginia cost $34 million per year, while lunches cost $138 million.

During a Jan. 11 hearing on her newest proposal, Roem said that because of the 2020 legislation, 44 schools in Prince William County, which lies in her district, have zero school meal debt compared to more than 50 schools that just enrolled in the CEP this year and had together collected $291,256 of school meal debt in the first semester of the prior year.

“Not every single student who attends a CEP school can’t afford their own breakfast and lunch,” Roem said. “A lot of them come from families that can, but most of the students … have enough insecurity at home financially that they need help, and collectively, we’ve decided it’s in our interest, it’s in the student’s interest and it’s the parent’s interest to make sure that we are taking care of everyone at the school.”

Adelle Settle, founder of nonprofit Settle the Debt, which raised roughly $250,000 last year to pay down the lunch debt for students in Prince William County, said she often hears from parents “who earn just over the threshold to receive free or reduced meals for their students, but they’re still struggling and they need help to pay for those school meals.”

Meal debt, Roem also said, is “money that could’ve gone into other areas such as a classroom or computer lab.”

“And frankly, if the federal government isn’t going to do its job, as far as I’m concerned, of fully funding universal free school meals for all, then we’ve got to step in and take care of our student constituents,” she said.

The bill now goes to the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee for consideration.

Addressing food insecurity in higher education

Roem is also carrying , which would create a grant program to address food insecurity among students at public colleges or universities in Virginia.

The bill is also heading to Senate Finance and Appropriations.

“With college enrollment still lower than it was pre-pandemic, addressing food insecurity can help students afford tuition and housing so they can stay in school and graduate on time,” she said.

Under the program, public institutions could apply for grants to address food insecurity.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

The most recent state budget made changes to allow more students to be fed at no cost, but the battle to quell child hunger is still ongoing in Ohio.

The budget bill passed last year provided more than $4 million in funding to allow any students qualified for reduced-price of free breakfast and lunch can get the meals at no cost for the .

It’s not quite the universal meals that when budget talks began, but the are progress in the right direction, child and education advocates in the state concluded.

The programs that are still attempting to help stem the flow of student hunger are seeing the struggles that inflation has on the cost of food, and Katherine Ungar, senior policy associate with the Children’s Defense Fund of Ohio, said the stigma of the income-based school food programs is still a barrier.

“It’s creating these categories that can create that stigma,” said Ungar.

Ohio has taken strides to help in the future by pledging to use federal dollars to establish a summer program that will give low-income families with child of school-aged children “grocery-buying benefits” while schools are closed, according to the USDA, who estimates more than 29 million children nationally could benefit.

“During the summer months, we estimate almost 1 million kids … lose access to meals,” Ungar said.

CDF-Ohio researched the whole-child impacts of categories like housing, health care and food insecurity. In fiscal year, 2023, the group’s showed an increase in the state’s students who were eligible for reduced-price or free school meals and considered “economically disadvantaged.”

The number of kids qualifying for the no-cost or low-cost lunches, for which any student in a household with up to 185% of the federal poverty line is eligible, when from 46.6% in the 2021-22 school year to nearly 50% in the 2022-23 school year.

This new summer benefit will be eligible to about 837,000 Ohio children, according to Ungar, and the economic impact of the benefit could bring $150 million into local economies.

The (EBT) gives eligible families who apply pre-loaded cards with $40 per child per month. The EBT program works in conjunction with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, Women, Infants and Children (WIC) funds and other nutrition assistance efforts.

But the program can only be used if eligible families apply. Children who are certified as eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school would be eligible for the Summer EBT as well, but still have to apply through the same process as the free-or-reduced-lunch application.

“We know there are families who qualify but have not completed the application form,” Ungar said. “Some families may not think they’re eligible, but it’s important that anyone who could be eligible applies, so that those benefits can get to the people who need them.”

A similar program was available during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the USDA found that the program decreased “children’s food hardship” by 33%, and took between 2.7 and 3.9 million out of hunger across the country.

According to research by the , the pandemic EBT program brought Ohio children an estimated $2.2 billion in nutrition assistance between Spring 2020 to Summer 2023, the end of the pandemic program.

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The Iowa Departments of Education and Health and Human Services notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture that Iowa will not participate in a program that provides additional food assistance for children during the summer, the state announced Friday.

The two Iowa departments, alongside Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, released a statement that they plan on “enhancing and expanding already existing childhood nutrition programs” instead of participating in the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children program in 2024.

The program, also known as Summer EBT, provides families with children who are eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school with an EBT card allowing them to purchase $40 of food per child each month when school is not in session.

In the release, the Iowa officials criticized the Summer EBT program for not having a “strong nutrition focus,” and said the program would cost Iowa $2.2 million, as states are required to cover part of the program’s administrative costs.

Reynolds linked the Summer EBT program to the federal Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) program, a temporary measure meant to provide more assistance for families with children whose access to food was affected by the pandemic.

“Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families. An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,” Reynolds said in a statement. “HHS and the Department of Education have well-established programs in place that leverage partnerships with community-based providers and schools who understand the needs of the families they serve.”

Luke Elzinga, policy and advocacy manager with the Des Moines Area Religious Council and board member of the Iowa Hunger Coalition, said the state had mischaracterized the program. Summer EBT is a new permanent, federal childhood nutrition program, separate from P-EBT. He said the state’s decision was “disappointing,” especially as food pantries and nonprofits see a rising need for food assistance in Iowa.

“We are seeing at food pantries and food banks across the state record-breaking numbers,” Elzinga said. “And during the pandemic, those numbers were down because people had additional SNAP benefits.”

State officials pointed to existing programs, including the Summer Food Service Program and Seamless Summer Option program, that provide food assistance to children and families during the summer in Iowa. These programs, funded by the USDA and administered by the state Department of Education, provide more than 500 meal sites in low-income areas throughout the state. The sites are run by local sponsors and provide spaces for children to get food during the summer.

According to the news release, more than 1.6 million meals and snacks were provided to Iowans age 19 and younger last summer. Iowa Department of Education Director McKenzie Snow said in the release that the department is “looking forward to expanding” partnerships with community groups that help support child nutrition when school is out of session.

Reynolds and Iowa HHS Director Kelly Garcia also criticized the Summer EBT program for not providing a focus on childhood nutrition. According to data from , Iowa has the 10th highest rate of obesity among high school students at 17%, in addition to having a 15.7% obesity rate for children age 10 to 17.

“No child should go hungry, least of all in Iowa, but the Summer EBT Program fails to address the barriers that exist to healthy and nutritional foods,” Garcia said in a statement. “Iowa’s kids need consistent access to nutritionally dense food, and their families need to feel supported to make healthy choices around food and nutrition. Another benefit card addressed to children is not the way to take on this issue.”

Elzinga disagreed with these arguments, saying that the statements show “our state government does not trust low-income people to make the correct food choices.”

He linked the officials’ remarks to a that would have prevented SNAP participants from purchasing food like fresh meat, bagged salads and sliced cheese.

While that language was removed, Elzinga said the focus on restricting food assistance programs on the basis of nutrition does not help people in need eat healthier. According to a , the most common barrier to a healthy diet for SNAP participants was the affordability of nutritious foods.

Elzinga said while Iowa will not be participating in 2024, he and other hunger advocates plan to make future participation in the Summer EBT program a top priority during the 2024 legislative session.

“We’re going to be working very hard during the legislative session to make sure that Iowa participates in 2025 and every year going forward, because we should not be sitting out again,” he said. “This is federal money for low-income kids during the summer. And it’s not a lot — It’s $120 per kid — but that makes a huge difference for families during the summer who are struggling to feed their kids.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

At Ilima Intermediate School, teacher Sarah Milianta-Laffin often sees students standing around the trash cans after lunch, asking their peers if they can eat the leftovers off their lunch tray.

Milianta-Laffin purchases around $500 worth of snacks at the start of each school year to keep in her classroom, anticipating that some students will need a granola bar to get through class if their families can’t afford school meals. 

“Meals should be things that we just give automatically, and we know we see better results,” Milianta-Laffin said. “Attention span is better when kids are not hungry. Anxiety is lower, because you’re not worried about where your next meal is coming from.”

Recent changes to  could allow a major expansion in the number of Hawaii schools that offer free meals to all students. But it’s unclear how many of schools will take advantage of the Community Eligibility Provision program, which provides schools in high-poverty areas with federal funds meant to subsidize the cost of offering free breakfast and lunch to all families. 

Before recent changes to the program, schools where 40% or more of students were low-income or had high-needs could qualify for the CEP. That includes students who are homeless, in foster care or enrolled in federal initiatives such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. 

Under recent changes to the program, the qualifying threshold has dropped to 25% of a school’s student body. According to a , which uses data from the 2022-23 school year, 83 new schools in Hawaii could enroll in the CEP.

Nicole Woo, director of research and economic policy at , said hungry students can’t learn. Even if families qualify for reduced-price lunch, they may still struggle to cover the remaining costs of school meals and could benefit from the CEP expansion, she added. 

“The benefits are clear,” Woo said. “We certainly hope the Department of Education and charter schools will take advantage of this new rule to get free meals to more kids.”  

But, Woo acknowledged, making this change might be easier said than done. 

A Financial Roadblock

Currently, 106 schools in Hawaii offer free meals to all students under CEP. 

Even with CEP’s expanded eligibility, Hawaii families may not see free lunch offered at their schools right away, said Daniela Spoto, director of . 

According to the FRAC database, 17 eligible Hawaii schools chose not to adopt CEP in the 2022-23 school year. 

The Department of Education is still analyzing how recent changes to the CEP rule will impact Hawaii schools, said deputy superintendent Tammi Oyadomari-Chun. 

One question the department faces is whether all Hawaii schools can now qualify for CEP. The federal government allows entire districts to participate in CEP, as long as their schools have an average of 25% or more of low-income students. 

Hawaii has a single statewide school district, but the DOE is still trying to determine whether the state can group together all schools and whether the district would meet the 25% threshold, Oyadomari-Chun said. Even if this is a possibility, the decision could be an expensive one for the department, Oyadomari-Chun added. 

CEP schools receive federal reimbursements to help to cover the cost of offering free breakfast and lunch to all students. But schools with fewer low-income students receive less federal support helping to cover the costs of those meals.  

The responsibility falls to the school district to cover the remaining costs of offering free meals at CEP schools, Oyadomari-Chun said. The department is still determining what these costs might be for next year, she added. 

Last year, the department estimated that, even with federal reimbursements, it would cost roughly $64 million a year to provide free meals to all students, although the final number could vary based on students’ participation in school meal programs and the costs of labor and food. 

“We really want to feed our kids,” Oyadomari-Chun said. “We really would love for the whole state to be part of CEP, but it does have a cost to the state that we have to analyze.” 

Hawaii isn’t the only state weighing the costs and benefits of expanding schools’ participation in the CEP. 

Some states, like Oregon and Washington, have already set aside funding to cover the costs of providing free lunch under the CEP, said Crystal FitzSimons, the director of school and out-of-school time programs at FRAC. When more state and federal funds are available to cover the costs of meals, schools and districts are more likely to take advantage of the CEP, she added. 

“There’s definitely a variation in the take-up rate based on the amount of federal reimbursement the school would receive for their meal,” FitzSimons said. 

Schools under the DOE would not have to use their own budgets to cover the costs of providing free lunches under the CEP, Oyadomari-Chun said. Instead, she added, the department would request necessary funding from the Legislature in the spring. 

But charter schools, while also eligible for the CEP, have to use their own budgets to cover whatever costs the federal government won’t reimburse for school lunches. While the number of DOE-operated schools in Hawaii participating in the CEP grew from seven to 92 between the 2015-16 and 2023-24 school years, the number of public charter schools dropped from 18 to 14.

For Ka ‘Umeke Ka’eo, a charter school in Hilo, enrolling in the CEP initially seemed like a straightforward decision, said director of operations Louisa Lee. The school knew many of its families could benefit from a free lunch, and Lee hoped the federal reimbursement rate would offset the cost of participating in the program. 

But participating in CEP cost the school approximately $120,000 to $150,000 a year, she said. The school considered withdrawing from the program but has continued its participation because families needed free lunch more than ever due to hardships from the Covid-19 pandemic, she said.

“I would say that our CEP plans are year to year,” Lee said. “It’s year to year for as long as we possibly can, or until we find another option.” 

Policy Possibilities 

The push for free meals in Hawaii schools isn’t new. , three bills in the Legislature called for the state to make food more accessible to students, from providing universal free meals to establishing a subsidy for students who do not qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. However, none of these bills passed into law. 

Rep. Mahina Poepoe introduced one of the bills, which would have offered free breakfast and lunch for all students beginning in the 2023-24 school year. Poepoe said she hoped to fill a need the federal government temporarily addressed during the height of the pandemic, when schools offered free lunch to all families.

By offering free meals to all students, schools can help to reduce the stigma around free or reduced-price meals, Poepoe said. She hopes the recent expansion of CEP-eligible schools can help reduce the cost of establishing a universal free school meal program. 

“I’m very hopeful that the rule change will make legislation more palatable in the upcoming session by further reducing the cost,” Poepoe said.  

Oyadomari-Chun said the department would be interested in seeing similar legislation introduced this year, but would need to consider the financial implications of the proposal. 

Sarah Fukuzono, an educational assistant at Kanoelani Elementary School, said providing free meals to all families would ensure that her students are ready to learn and have access to nutritional foods. She recalled how, last year, she would bring eggs to one of her students in the morning, knowing that he would come to school cranky and without breakfast.

“If the student is hungry, I’m not going to get any work out of them,” Fukuzono said. “But if we have a general baseline of, these kids have eaten breakfast, these kids have eaten a nutritious lunch, then we can move on to things like learning.” 

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by , Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and .

This story was originally published in .

As New Jersey students returned to classrooms this week, the number of them eligible for free or reduced school breakfast and lunch jumped — and hunger insecurity advocates are eyeing ways to make those meals free for all children.

“We are hopeful — since New Jersey has done so much and really led the way in addressing hunger and food insecurity — that in this next legislative session, they can get a school-meals-for-all bill passed,” said Lisa Pitz of Hunger Free New Jersey.

About 26,000 new students  program this school year thanks to a bill Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law last September. That’s in addition to the more than who received free or reduced breakfast and lunch between 2019 and 2020, the most recently available data.

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The law, known as the Working Class Families’ Anti-Hunger Act, expanded eligibility to families who earn 200% of the federal poverty level. That translates to households with three children earning $46,060 maximum, or for those with two children, $36,620.

It also requires all school districts to provide a free school breakfast and lunch program and to publicize its availability to their communities.

While experts applauded the new law, signed soon after pandemic-era  providing free lunches expired, nutrition experts and food hunger advocates want to see more action from state lawmakers.

“There’s definitely interest at the state level in going for a universal meals program for the state. It’s just a matter of getting everyone on board and finding the will to do it,” said Sal Valenza, public policy chair for the New Jersey School Nutrition Association.

The Assembly passed a bill () in June that would further expand eligibility for free and reduced school meals for the 2024-25 school year. The bill would also require the creation of a task force that would study school food security issues and recommend state- and federal-level action.

A spokeswoman for Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Middlesex), a prime sponsor of the legislation, said he believes every child should have access to meals at school, and the bill advanced in June will “put New Jersey on the path to accomplish that goal.”

The bill still needs to advance in the state Senate, where it has yet to be heard in committee. It is expected to cost the state about $57 million.

that would phase in free school lunches for all students by 2028 advanced out of an Assembly committee in June but did not win full approval before the Legislature went on its summer recess. Under that bill, which is estimated to cost the state more than $500 million after it’s phased in, New Jersey would join a handful of other states to provide free school meals for all students.  Massachusetts officials made school lunches available to all public school students regardless of income level.

But New Jersey would be an outlier by using the phase-in approach, noted Pitz.

“Really, the time to act on this is now,” she said. “We don’t ask our kids to pay for their textbooks or when they take the bus. School meals should just be part of their school day so that all kids can learn and grow to their full potential.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

WASHINGTON — Every public school kid in the United States was eligible for free school meals during the COVID-19 pandemic, regardless of family income, thanks to the federal government.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .

On June 25, President Biden signed the Keep Kids Fed Act of 2022. The law will extend some school meal waivers through the end of the 2022-23 school year.

With a massive, pandemic-era expansion of free school meals scheduled to expire on June 30, Democrats and Republicans around a possible compromise that would extend the federal program through the summer. Passed , the deal is expected to move through the Senate and be signed by President Biden in the next few days.

Authorized by Congress and the Department of Agriculture over the last two years, widened the category of students eligible to receive breakfast and lunch. Schools providing meals were also offered higher reimbursement rates for the costs of running their programs, as well as the flexibility to serve food off-site and substitute for items lost to supply-chain snags.Those benefits by proponents of renewing the waivers, or even following the pandemic’s end. But language to continue the program into next year was left out of the FY2023 budget signed by the president in March.

In the near term, the could ease classroom hunger and simplify the work of schools in the months to come. But research suggests that greater availability of free meals in public schools actually lowers grocery spending even for those without school-aged children. And at a time of sharply rising food prices, it’s conceivable that the end of the waivers would contribute to further inflation.

In circulated last fall by the National Bureau of Economic Research, academics from the University of Chicago and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found that an earlier boost to free meals — through the Obama-era Community Eligibility Provision, which allowed certain schools to offer breakfast and lunch to all students without having to process individual applications — caused a significant decline in grocery sales at local retailers. Those chains responded by lowering prices across all their stores, leading nearby households to spend approximately 4.5 percent less in grocery bills in areas where the policy was adopted.

Jessie Handbury, a Wharton economist and one of the paper’s co-authors, called the effects “fairly sizable.”

“Because they’re responding across all their retail locations, the…drop in prices is going to affect all the households in the vicinity of that chain’s stores,” she said. “So you’ll have households that aren’t directly impacted by the demand shock, or that live nowhere near the communities that are taking up universal free lunch, but are still benefiting from it.”

The Community Eligibility Provision was introduced in select states through the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, before becoming nationally available in the 2014-15 school year. Participating schools (identified as those where over 40 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch) could choose to provide such meals to all of their enrolled students, whether they were eligible or not. 

To study the effects of the legislation on grocery spending, Handbury and UChicago professor Sarah Moshary gathered information from the National Center for Education Statistics showing school-level participation in the Community Eligibility Provision between the 2011-12 and 2015-16 academic years. They combined that with self-reported grocery purchase figures from the , which collected data from a representative panel of nearly 50,000 American households over the same timeframe. 

Finally, the pair added findings from a separate industry tracker of weekly grocery chain sales and sale quantity by product. In the five years under study, the system included responses from over 20,000 stores.

In all, the study found that homes with school-aged children reduced their grocery spending by an average of 7.5 percent (about $200 annually, or roughly two weeks of spending for families included in the sample) when a local school adopted the Community Eligibility Provision — the direct impact of their children receiving more meals for free in school. What’s more, that drop in sales led grocery chains to slash prices not just for the directly affected stores (i.e., the ones located near CEP schools), but in all of their locations. As a consequence, shopping costs in the median ZIP code affected by the policy were reduced by an average of 4.5 percent.

Handbury said it was plausible that a large number of families who were always eligible to receive free meals at school only began taking advantage of them once the provision was adopted. The sudden universality of the program may have reduced the social penalty sometimes referred to as “lunch shaming,” she surmised.

“You could imagine that when it costs money for their child to get lunch at school, they just automatically pack lunch for their children,” Handbury argued. “And when it became free, that was enough to induce them to at least send their kids to try free school lunch. Possibly because there was a reduction in the stigma associated with getting free lunch — or even getting school lunch — it just became what you did.”

Other studies have also shown clear consumer benefits accruing to families impacted by the program. , from researchers at Vanderbilt and the University of Louisville, showed that families with children spent between 5 and 19 percent less on monthly grocery purchases in areas that implemented the Community Eligibility Provision. Low-income households also experienced a meaningful improvement in dietary quality, and fewer were classified as food-insecure, in the wake of CEP adoption.

“The savings of $11 per month (or up to almost $39 for fully exposed ZIP codes) are realistic in magnitude and represent a meaningful change for low-income families that may face especially tight resource constraints,” said Michelle Marcus, one of the paper’s co-authors. “For the average household in our sample with two children, CEP provides about 8.25 additional meals per household for each of the eight academic months.”

Price discounts of that magnitude may not seem like much, but during a period of dramatic inflation — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by over 9 percent between April 2021 and April 2022 — they might make a significant difference. Since the COVID-era meal waivers operate essentially like an enhancement of CEP, Handbury noted, their potential expiration could be expected to have “weekly inflationary effects” on those prices.

That’s partly why advocacy groups are already praising the bipartisan deal to extend the waivers for another school year. Earlier this month, the Food Research and Action Center touting the effects of the Community Eligibility Provision and advocating further flexibility for provision of school nutrition going forward.

In an email to ���˶���, a spokesman for FRAC said the group was “excited about the provisions included in the bill that will support access to summer meals, allow children who are eligible for reduced-price meals to receive free meals, and the additional funding for schools and child care.” 

Another group, the School Nutrition Association, was a vital resource at a time when the cost of kitchen essentials like wheat bread and dish gloves had risen by well over 100 percent.

“School nutrition professionals have withstood crippling supply chain breakdowns, rising prices and labor shortages in their efforts to provide students healthy meals, at a time when families are struggling with higher costs. With crucial federal waivers on the verge of expiring, this agreement offers school meal programs a lifeline to help build back toward normal operations.”