Chronic hunger is harmful to anyone who experiences it, but it has long-lasting impacts on children. Children who experience food insecurity tend to have more behavioral problems at school and in social situations, poorer educational outcomes, and suffer long-term health problems.
Roughly 1 in 7 Pennsylvania children experienced food insecurity at last count in 2020. With inflation still high, wages in PA still low, and Congress having ended SNAP Emergency Allotments, more families are going hungry.
Access to school meals reduces child hunger and improves their health and well-being. But last June, Congress ended its pandemic waiver program allowing schools to provide meals at no charge to all students.
Schools and families loved the free meals for all waiver program. As Baldwin-Whitehall School District food services director Joyce Weber told the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, “The whole school lunch stigma of either you are eligible for free meals or you have to pay money was removed from the students. The pressure was taken off of the children.”
The return this school year of requiring families to pay has been “very difficult,” she reported. Their district now has $50,000 in lunch debt.
It’s time for Pennsylvania legislators to step up and make sure all students in public schools get free school lunches.
Sign on in support for School Meals for All by signing this pledge from the School Meals for All Coalition.
Background:
K-12 students and schools are struggling to afford school meals
The federal government has long provided free or reduced-price meals through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to low-income students. Nearly one million PA students are currently enrolled.
However, this program doesn’t help the many families who can’t afford school meals but don’t qualify for assistance. The income cutoff for the NSLP program is set at 185% of the federal poverty level, which is far too low.
A 2018 United Way of Pennsylvania report estimated any family of four with two school-age children who earned less than $4,200 a month would not be able to meet their basic needs in Warren County, PA – the most affordable in the Commonwealth. Yet that same year, the eligibility for reduced-price school meals ended at incomes of $3,869 per month and higher.
Nearly 1 out 3 children who experienced food insecurity in 2018 lived in households where their family earned too much to qualify for nutrition assistance programs. Children in those families either don’t eat while at school, or they owe money for the meals they do eat.
Prior to the pandemic, the problem of lunch shaming was well-known: schools, desperate to collect unpaid lunch debt, would refuse meals to students, write notes on students’ hands, or use other public tactics to try to recover unpaid lunch debts. In 2017, the state legislature wisely passed legislation that Sen. Jay Costa (D-Allegheny) sponsored to limit such tactics. No child should be stigmatized for the financial struggles of their parents.
But in 2019, under rising unpaid debts, school districts had to raid their general funds. The legislature eased the lunch shaming rules, shifting those costs back onto struggling families.
Since then the lunch debt problem has only grown with the pandemic’s impact on supply chains and rising food, labor, and transportation costs. School districts with small budgets are also having an increasingly hard time getting the food service industry, dominated by just a few huge corporations, to provide food to their cafeterias. They have no fiscal room for lunch debt forgiveness.
So as of October 2022, more than 87,000 Pennsylvania students had incurred close to $15 million dollars of financial liabilities related to K-12 school lunches, according to the Education Data Initiative.
Parents and school districts need to partner to ensure that children succeed in their education. That kind of partnership is easily soured when the district hires a collection agency to recover $75 in unpaid lunch debt while a family is living paycheck to paycheck.
How free school meals for all can help
During the pandemic, Congress allowed all districts to employ what was once only available to high-poverty schools (through the Community Eligibility Provision): free school meals for all. Unfortunately, they ended this pandemic program the summer before the 2022-23 school year.
The Obama administration’s Community Eligibility Provision has for more than a decade helped schools in high-poverty areas, like at Pittsburgh Public Schools, pay for free school meals for all students. But schools that don’t meet the criteria for this program, typically in rural and suburban areas where poverty is more diffuse, wind up with lunch debt from families who face financial hardship but don’t quite qualify for help.
Furthermore, recent studies show that school meals results in increased academic achievement, improved meals participation, improved diet, and food security. Because school meals are healthy, researchers found that the Body Mass Index of students doesn’t change or improves when they consume more school food.
Providing free school meals for all kids statewide would ease schools’ administrative burdens. Without having to worry about collections, nutrition departments can focus on providing quality, nutritious meals. Staff won’t need to act as debt collectors, and schools won’t need to divert resources to cover debt. Most importantly, children won’t face stigma or be penalized due to their family’s financial status.
To address all of these intertwining problems – child hunger, lunch shaming, and school lunch debt – the solution is school meals for all. Meals are an essential part of the school day and are needed for educational success.
If, as Rep. Kinkead (D-Allegheny) two Pa. House committees on Mar. 30, the government requires all children to attend school, then they should get the food they need when they’re there. As Just Harvest has asserted for years, why should nutrition be any different than textbooks or the other integral resources that schools provide?
More and more states understand this and are pursuing plans to make school meals free for all their students. Pennsylvania should join them.
Supporting free school meals success
To affordably provide healthy and free school meals for all K-12 public school students, state officials should require schools that qualify to enroll in the Community Eligibility Provision. This way the federal government picks up the tab for those free meals. That said, the federal reimbursement rate for school meals is usually inadequate, so most states supplement it with state funds.
Pennsylvania could provide supplemental support for typically rural and suburban schools that don’t quite qualify for CEP and so wouldn’t get a full federal reimbursement. The state supplement would also help the typically urban schools already enrolled in CEP to cover rising food and transportation costs.
But if Pennsylvania is going to help cover more school meal costs, then they must accurately estimate those costs.
Unfortunately, Pennsylvania hasn’t changed its supplemental meal rate since 2001. For more than two decades the state’s reimbursement has been 10 cents per meal, 12 cents if the school participates in the National School Lunch and Breakfast Program, and 14 cents if breakfast participation is over 20%.
But food costs have risen nearly 60% since 2001. Furthermore, the federal meal support that Congress put in place during the pandemic – an extra 40 cents per lunch and 10 cents per breakfast – will expire at the end of this school year on June 30.
Joyce Weber explained what an increase to the state supplement would mean for the Baldwin-Whitehall school district:
We would be operating in the black and we would be able to provide better food choices for our students … We would be able to meet our payroll debt and money would not have to be removed from the district’s general fund … [which] is taking money away from the educational materials that are intended for our student’s education.”
We recommend that Pennsylvania double the current supplement, and make inflation-related adjustments to the supplement annually.
What you can do
In response to these problems, Sen. Lindsey Williams (D-Allegheny) and Rep. Kinkead (D-Allegheny) have introduced Senate Bill 180 and House Bill 180. This legislation would ensure that school lunch is free for all public school students. It also cancels out the lunch debt that schools are carrying.
You can support that measure by signing this pledge from the School Meals for All Coalition.
If you live in Allegheny County and would like to join us in a meeting with your state legislator to support this legislation, please reach out to Dana at [email protected]
You are so right. Meals at school are really the only sure way to know the kids really got fed,