Sorry, kid, no lunch
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has doubled down on its refusal to let schools serve free meals to all students this fall—despite rising food insecurity and pleas from anti-hunger advocates, school nutrition officials, and lawmakers.
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The announcement was prompted by a request from Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Representative Robert Scott of Virginia. On August 14, the lawmakers asked the agency to extend crucial regulatory waivers that would allow schools nationwide to serve meals at no cost to all children, regardless of whether they were enrolled students, and regardless of whether they technically qualified for free lunch.
Before the pandemic, students had to meet specific criteria in order to qualify for USDA’s free and reduced price lunch program. Households whose annual income fell within 130 percent of the federal poverty threshold were eligible for free meals, while those that made between 130 and 185 percent of the federal poverty threshold received discounted ones. In areas where at least half of a school’s student body qualified for free lunch, officials could offer lunch at no cost to all kids. In all these cases, USDA would reimburse schools for the bulk of the costs of providing free meals.
Then in March, as the economy contracted and unemployment soared, USDA issued regulatory waivers permitting all schools to serve free breakfast and lunch to all children, including those not of school-age or enrolled in private institutions. School nutrition officials welcomed the move, which allowed many districts to serve as de facto hunger relief organizations within their communities. USDA said that initial waivers were possible thanks to a boost in funding from the Families First coronavirus relief bill, but that it needed another infusion of cash to extend them.
This means that schools will soon have to begin charging for meals again and tracking meal debt among kids who can’t pay.
Because we can pay for Trump’s endless golf trips and secret service protection for all his kids including when they take business trips abroad, but we can’t pay for universal school lunch.
“This is a basic need for all people,” says Michelle Hammond, food services director of the Roaring Forks School District in Colorado, which will no longer be able to provide free meals to all kids under the age of 18 in the coming school year. “[Money] should not be a hindrance for our kids.”
Let them eat brioche.
In our town, the school system says 90% of the students qualify for free lunches. And that was before COVID. I personally don’t love the idea that the schools would feed rich kids for free, but I’m willing to accept that if it would get the rest of the kids fed.
More and more the Republicans are trying to prove that we are correct when we say they believe the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth. All these babies they want to be brought into the world? I think they should all be placed on the doorstep of the White House and Congress, so the people who refuse to do anything to make life possible for them will have to feed them. But they wouldn’t, would they? I suspect a lot of these guys could just step over a foundling and not let it disturb their day. They probably kick puppies for fun.
How much are the schools paying for people to track the lunch debt? For debt collection? For making sure that the kids who get the free and discounted lunches actually qualify for them? Wouldn’t this money be better spent, just feeding more kids?
In South Africa we have TV licenses. The license fees actually cost more to collect than they’re worth. They also bloat the balance sheet, making the SABC look more solvent than it actually is because most of those debts are bad or even outright fictitious. It took years after my father died, for my mother to convince the SABC that my father was indeed dead and thus not likely to pay them for the arrears that accrued after he, you know, died and we told them he died.
Because those debts are not worth the cost of collecting them, there is a call to do away with TV licenses altogether. It would be better to see the SABC’s assets as they are, than to have fake assets and income on the books.
All of this to say, it isn’t unusual for administration to cost more than it is actually worth.
Do the cost savings involved in limiting school lunches via means testing, merit the additional administrative burden involved in the same means testing?
Because if I read iknklast’s frequent comments regarding working in America’s education system correctly, it sounds like there is a serious case of administrative bloat going on, which I would suspect would be more of an issue regarding costs than some rich kids getting a free school lunch.
Bruce,
It doesn’t matter because it turns out that the one thing an awful lot of people really can’t stand is other people getting stuff they themselves think is undeserved. If (other) people suffer to protect that flimsy pretext of fairness, it’s a feature rather than a bug.
Food is cheaper than paying a lot of people to make sure someone isn’t getting fed. Feed all the kids for free – in a just system, those with rich parents will have their meals more than paid for in the increased taxes their parents pay, and all the children in a school being treated the same way reduces class-based friction.
The children of rich parents can attend public schools, so adding lunch doesn’t seem like a big deal.
You have indeed read that correctly, and the system does not operate more efficiently for it; quite the opposite, actually.
I see no reason for the “free” public schools to charge for so much. Students not only have to pay for lunches, they have a long list of supplies they have to purchase every year, including boxes of Kleenex for the entire classroom (and yes, this is a required purchase, if they are still doing it. They were when I was younger, with the rationale that the students were using the Kleenex so it wasn’t right to ask the teachers to pay for it; I agree. The school can pay.)
In Oklahoma, when I lived there, the voters never passed a school bond in Oklahoma City. They wanted the schools, they wanted the schools to be better, but they didn’t want to pay for them. I also suspect some of it was that they didn’t want the “wrong” (read: non-white) kids getting stuff. So they would point out the bloat at the top, such as the fact that every time we passed a school bond before, the superintendent redid his office and his private bathroom. Seems like there are ways to deal with that corruption, starting by hiring different superintendents, and making it impossible for them to use that money that way. Here in Nebraska, they always pass school bonds (at least in my town), and there is always a stipulation as to how the money will be spent.
Too much educational money goes to the comfort of the administrators, and that is at all levels, from kindergarten all the way to Ph.D. programs. The students have to pick up the slack in tuition or supplies. The teachers also pick up a lot of it, because K-12 teachers often have to buy most of their own supplies these days.
Tigger @4, you’re quite right. It does say something sad about society/the economy that we even have to worry about making sure people are fed. My partners boss was instructed last year to freeze wages and no overtime. A lot of the people who work there are not paid well and relied on overtime to get ahead. he hunted around in his budget and came up with a couple of hundred dollars a week to buy breakfast cereal, milk, fruit, bread and sandwich fillings. A small gesture, but it meant that for several months any staff who wanted to could get two meals a day. It also made it possible for him to retain people who might have had to move on otherwise.