(C) Common Dreams
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Every Child Has the Right to a Free School Meal [1]

['Nora De La Cour', 'Daniel Finn', 'Grace Blakeley', 'Thomas Piketty', 'Clara Martínez-Toledano', 'Amory Gethin', 'Anton Jäger', 'Matt Bruenig', 'Tatu Ahponen', 'Dave Kamper']

Date: 2023-03

Looming Lunch Debt Like other school cafeteria workers, Mary Dotsey of Vero Beach, Florida, valued the ability to make nutritious meals available to all students. “If they’re not eating properly,” she explains, “they’re not learning right.” Proving Dotsey’s point, when schools adopt universal meals through Community Eligibility or another program, we see improvements in students’ academic performance, behavior, attendance, and psychosocial functioning. Above all, the implementation of universal meals causes meal participation to shoot up, demonstrating that the need far exceeds the number of kids who are able to get certified. This is not at all surprising when you consider that, for example, a two-parent, one-child household must currently make less than $32,318 to qualify for free meals. Now that the pandemic flexibility is over, Dotsey’s district is once again dividing children into stigmatizing categories of free, reduced-price, and “paid” lunch. When she enters the lunch numbers of her middle schoolers, Dotsey can see who owes money. She turns a blind eye wherever possible, but technically she and her colleagues are required to swap out these children’s hot entrées for cold sandwiches, sometimes just cheese on a hamburger bun. “And I can tell you right now,” Dotsey adds grimly, “the kids aren’t taking it. They’re walking away without anything.” When schools adopt universal meals, we see improvements in students’ academic performance, behavior, attendance, and psychosocial functioning. Not only is the cold replacement lunch less appealing; it’s also a red badge of economic hardship that older kids will do anything to avoid. FRAC’s FitzSimons told Jacobin that where free meals aren’t universal, participation rates drop off among free meal–eligible middle and high school students — suggesting that as children approach adolescence, they feel the painful “welfare” stigma associated with claiming a means-tested benefit. “Lunch shaming” tactics like cold sandwiches came under fire a few years ago, and many states have worked to eliminate them. But the reality is, school nutrition programs like Dotsey’s are in a bind. If they let kids eat a hot lunch without paying for it — unquestionably the right thing to do — meal charges accrue, and they have to get paid somehow. “That creates a tremendous amount of pressure within the district to try to figure out how to deal with that debt,” explains FitzSimons, who told Jacobin that because the money cannot be pulled from school nutrition accounts, it ends up draining resources from education. In a new report from the School Nutrition Association (SNA), over 96 percent of districts that aren’t offering universal meals indicated that the loss of the federal waivers has caused a spike in unpaid meal fees, with a combined burden of over $19 million. Not only is the cold replacement lunch less appealing; it’s also a red badge of economic hardship that older kids will do anything to avoid. “This school year has been incredibly tumultuous for districts,” FitzSimons notes, because they once again have to devote considerable resources to chasing down and processing meal applications from parents who may not have realized they’d ever need to apply for school food. This tumult is hitting cash-strapped nutrition departments already overwhelmed by staffing shortages, ballooning food prices, and the dire challenges facing public education. Given the many problems that come with nonuniversal meals, you might wonder why high-poverty districts like Dotsey’s don’t simply adopt the CEP. The main reason is that the CEP involves a complicated funding formula with a tiered reimbursement rate that isn’t financially viable for all qualifying schools and districts. Nevertheless, FitzSimons told Jacobin that FRAC’s research is showing “a big increase” in CEP adoption this year, likely because schools don’t want to return to a model that forces them to deny children food. ‘If the program’s structured not to feed all kids, then not all kids will get fed.’ In the SNA report, districts that offer universal meals logged a significant uptick in meal participation, as inflation makes it much harder for parents to keep pantries stocked. Conversely, nonuniversal programs indicated a 23 percent reduction in participation, with children like Dotsey’s middle schoolers skipping meals that could be a primary source of their daily calories. Quite simply, as FitzSimons observes, “if the program’s structured not to feed all kids, then not all kids will get fed.”

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2023/03/universal-free-school-lunch-means-testing

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