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 .

Two new education bills have been introduced by Democrats in the Ohio House: One to ensure school meals for any students who request them, and another to increase base teacher salaries to $50,000 per year. The future of the proposed laws is uncertain with Republican supermajorities controlling both the Ohio House and Ohio Senate.

A bill introduced by state Rep. Darnell Brewer, D-Cleveland, and state Rep. Ismail Mohamed, D-Columbus, would “require public schools to provide meals and related services to students,” even beyond changes made in the latest operating budget.

“Regardless of whether a student has money to pay for a meal or owes money for earlier meals, each school district shall provide a meal to a student who requests one,” the new bill, , states.

The bill also prohibits a requirement that a district discard a meal after it has been served “because of a student’s inability to pay for the meal or because money is owed for previously provided meals” or “publicly identify or stigmatize a student who cannot pay for a meal or who owes a meal debt.”

In 2019, a 9-year-old Ohio student’s hot lunch was taken away over a $9.75 unpaid balance, .

The bill comes after changes were made in the most recent state operating budget to provide no-cost meals to any student who qualifies for reduced-price or free meals.

After the budget was passed, advocates praised the , but said more could be done to reduce the categorization of children and the visibility of those who have meal debt.

qualified for reduced-price or free lunches for the 2022-2023 school year, according to data from the Children’s Defense Fund of Ohio, up from 46.6% the year before. Qualification is based on household income, and children are eligible at up to 185% of the federal poverty line.

Brewer and Mohamed’s bill also requires that districts direct “communications about a student’s meal debt to a parent or guardian and not to the student, except … if a student inquires about that student’s meal debt.”

Teacher pay

In a separate bill, state Rep. Joe Miller, D-Amherst, seeks to increase the base teacher salary to $50,000 per year statewide.

That would be an increase from the current base salary of $35,000 for teachers with a bachelor’s degree. Teachers with less than a bachelor’s degree would have a base salary set at $43,250, while teachers with five years of training but no master’s degree would start at $51,900 and teachers with a master’s degree or higher would start at $54,750, according to the bill, .

Ohio’s average teacher salary has remained lower than the U.S. average since 2014, according to an analysis by, which showed an 11.2% increase in Ohio salaries from fiscal year 2012 to 2021, where U.S. salaries grew by 17.9%.

A found that average weekly wagers for teachers have remained “relatively flat” since 1996, with teachers making more than 14% less in Ohio when compared with other college-educated workers.

Salaries will still be determined based on years of service under the newest House bill, including a maximum of five years active military service.

Both bills are led by Democratic sponsors, meaning the way forward will be rocky in a Republican supermajority Ohio General Assembly, especially when this particular General Assembly has had a .

The bills still need to be assigned to a committee for consideration before public comment and possible votes can take place.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

Fueled by Kids, a nonprofit founded and run by teenagers in Bedford, New Hampshire, fills the 67 hour gap between when students receive school lunch on Friday afternoons and again when they receive school breakfast on Monday morning, alleviating the food anxiety that many of these children experience as a result of not knowing when or where they might be having their next meal.

Each week, Fueled by Kids members gather for their club meeting at Bedford High School, then pick up food that they preordered from local grocers. They partner with other high schools to pack bags of groceries — all ready-to-eat or simple enough to be prepared by the students themselves — that then get distributed to more than 20 schools serving over 1,000 students. The recipients are all anonymous to Fueled by Kids organizers, identified by school counselors and principals as students who may face food insecurity over the weekend. All of Fueled by Kids’ funds raised go directly back to purchasing food for distribution.

At Marblehead Community Charter Public School, a food pantry was founded in the wake of the pandemic to support both the school’s families and the broader community. The pantry, which has a separate entrance on the side of the school, is frequented by many, all of whom express overwhelming gratitude, and many of whom feel shame that they need to request assistance. An on-site garden also supports the school’s food programs and provides educational opportunities for MCCPS students to learn about where their food comes from.

Hot, scratch-made breakfasts and lunches are available to every student, every day. The meals are so healthful and delicious that the teachers and staff often opt to eat what’s on the menu. After this universal program launched at MCCPS, the number of students accessing breakfast nearly tripled, and nearly twice as many students participated in school lunch. Lines for lunch became so long that they had to create an additional lunch period to accommodate all of their students. The impact on MCCPS students has been profound — all students now have access to nutritious, homemade meals without the burden of stigma and they are better prepared to start the day physically and mentally.

For many New Hampshire public school students, getting breakfast at school is not a priority.

The Granite State has one of the largest divides in the country between the number of school breakfasts eaten and the number of school lunches eaten, from the Food Research and Action Center. While an average of 95,337 students per day ate school-provided lunch in the 2021-2022 school year, fewer than half of those students – 45,192 – also ate breakfast, the center found in a 2023 report.

That ratio puts New Hampshire in the bottom 16 states in the country. Now, educators and child anti-hunger advocates are urging Granite State schools to increase their promotion of school breakfasts and make it easier for students to eat them.

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“School breakfast has maybe a bad rap,” said Amy Hollar, the SNAP-Ed director at the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension. “… It’s better than it used to be. And it can get even better the more of us that embrace it and work together to make school meals a priority.”

This school year, nine school districts are competing in the School Breakfast Challenge, in which each district will attempt to increase the number of students eating breakfast by the highest percentage by March.

Organized by New Hampshire Hunger Solutions, an advocacy group, as well as the UNH Cooperative Extension and the New England Dairy Council, the competition aims to empower and encourage schools to launch campaigns promoting breakfast.

Educators and child anti-hunger advocates say school breakfasts help increase nutrition, boost attentiveness, and increase reimbursement to schools.

“We know that kids that eat school breakfast miss less school,” said Hollar. “They’re more alert and focused.”

The competition has been accompanied by a series of webinars to give school administrators ideas on how to boost breakfast participation. And it follows a template crafted in part by the University of Minnesota, which helped spearhead a four-year project in that state to do the same.

Riona Corr, deputy director of New Hampshire Hunger Solutions, said school meals are important in making sure students have consistent energy throughout the day.

And she said bringing in more students for breakfast would increase the amount they are reimbursed, which could help address school lunch debt.

The Food Research and Action Center found that New Hampshire schools could collectively receive $8.6 million more in school meal reimbursements per year if 70 percent of the students who eat lunch at school also ate breakfast.

“Say there’s 50 percent of the school who’s participating in free and reduced lunch,” Corr said. “Why is only 8 percent of those kids participating in free breakfast?”

For schools looking to expand breakfasts, educators have strategies. Schools should make the food more convenient to access and provide more flexibility to students about when they can eat it, they say.

Advocates are pushing “breakfast after the bell,” an approach in which schools allow students to pick up and eat breakfasts after the first class begins. Many schools require students eating breakfast to do so before that first period, which researchers say discourages many from doing it.

“A lot of schools – nationwide, not just in New Hampshire – are allowing breakfast before the first bell, and then not allowing kids to eat afterward,” said Corr.

Under the “breakfast after the bell” model, schools are encouraged to allow breakfast to be eaten in the classrooms, or in an area more convenient than the cafeteria. That could include tables with to-go food bags near entrances, or grab-and-go carts in the hallway.

And students are given more time to eat those meals, even if class has begun.

Meanwhile the UNH Cooperative Extension has developed a toolkit for “nudges,” or techniques school administrators can use to remind students about the breakfasts and encourage them to eat. The tips range from ways to incorporate nutrition advice into classroom curricula to pre-written jokes about breakfast that can be read out over the loudspeakers.

The challenge offers schools three participation tiers with increasing levels of commitment. Tier one is deploying the “‘nudges”; tier two involves attending New Hampshire Hunger Solutions’ webinar series; and tier three involves developing an action plan for a broader campaign.

For schools putting in the effort, the challenge has a modest cash prize for the largest increase in school breakfast take up: The Dairy Council has donated $1,000, which will be distributed to two of the winners, Corr said.

But the competition is only a piece of the overall effort, advocates say. The Cooperative Extension and New Hampshire Hunger Solutions are working with school food service directors and wellness committees to develop campaigns tailored to each district’s challenges and needs, Corr said.

“Where is your barrier? Is it administration? Is it teachers? Is it students?” Corr said.

Those challenges can be hard for some schools to overcome. In some cases, low cafeteria staffing levels can hamper some of the more innovative ideas. Other times, custodial staff will raise concerns with additional cleaning needed if schools allow eating in classrooms.

Students face stigmas associated with school breakfasts. And parents might assume that the breakfasts are not nutritious, thinking back to their own childhood experiences.

All of those hurdles can be overcome, Corr said, but some are more entrenched than others. It’s why the campaign is focusing on nudges as a low-cost way to get involved without overextending staff resources.

In continuing its campaign, New Hampshire advocates are following the footsteps of the University of Minnesota, which in 2013 launched its own breakfast promotion program in 16 high schools across the state.

Nutritionists at the University of Minnesota kept tabs on the schools, sorting some into control groups that received fewer resources and others into experimental groups that received budgets to launch ad campaigns.

One school took on a Hunger Games theme in an homage to the film series that had just opened in theaters, complete with lighthearted videos. Others tried taste tests where kitchen staff would experiment with new variations of recipes like banana bread and students would vote on their favorites.

“There was one school where the admin was, oh my gosh, 110 percent on board,” said Mary Schroeder, an extension educator for health and nutrition at the University of Minnesota. That school produced a video that included every student in the school, she added.

In one of the most innovative and effective strategies, several schools offered free breakfast for all students one day a week, carving out money in its budget to do so. That allowed everyone to try the food without fear of stigma, and helped to combat negative perceptions students may have had about its quality, Schroeder said.

“When they did their pre surveys … many children said that they didn’t like the taste of school breakfast,” Schroeder said. “But then when they asked other questions, they realized a lot of the kids who didn’t like the taste of school breakfast had never eaten school breakfast.”

The program, which lasted four years, produced strong results: The schools in the experimental group that received funding and pursued the recommended strategies saw a 49 percent higher increase in breakfast takeup than those that didn’t, from the extension. And the extra takeup in meals brought in between $90 to $489 per day in reimbursement money to the schools, after accounting for the program start-up costs.

This year, Minnesota lawmakers made the breakfast pitch much easier: The legislature passed a universal school breakfast law making them free for all students.

New Hampshire does not pay for universal school lunches or breakfasts; students who want breakfast will need to pay full price if their family makes more than 185 percent of the federal poverty level.

But advocates in the Granite State say strong efforts by schools can create a word-of-mouth effect that can get more kids buying the breakfasts anyway, benefitting the school and themselves.

“We want to make sure that we can promote a culture where it’s great to eat breakfast at school, because for some kids that’s the only place they’re gonna get it,” said Hollar.

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 Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .

After the state turned down federal funding for summertime child food vouchers, the South Dakota Department of Education is seeking sponsors for another program that provides summer meals to needy children.

Sponsors feed kids who qualify for free or reduced price lunch during the school year, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture reimburses sponsors. , sponsorships are available for Bennett, Bon Homme, Buffalo, Charles Mix, Custer, Gregory, McCook, Meade, Oglala Lakota, and Stanley counties.

Potential sponsors must by Feb. 1 to be considered.

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The ask comes after South Dakota’s decision not to deliver to more than 60,000 kids in the summer of 2023.

That money was available through a separate USDA program called Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT), launched during the pandemic and made permanent this year.

South Dakota was to opt out.

Unlike the summer food program now seeking brick-and-mortar hosts for meals, the summer EBT doesn’t tie food aid to location. Instead, it offers EBT cards worth $40 per child per month to eligible families through the summer, which can be used to buy , but not hot foods.

The state signed on for pandemic EBT in 2020 and 2021, but not in 2022 or 2023.

Gov. Kristi Noem’s spokesperson, Ian Fury, that because of “South Dakota’s record low unemployment rate, our robust existing food programs, and the administrative burden associated with running this program, we declined these particular federal dollars.”

The site-based summer food program is not meant to be the only way to provide meals to kids when school’s out, said Nancy Van Der Weide, spokesperson for the Department of Education.

“It is a stop-gap to help those kids who fall through the cracks — the ones who, for whatever reason, are not able to access food via SNAP,” she said via email, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Offering food, as opposed to money for food, “ensures that the meals these children eat are balanced and nutritious, and that meals are available throughout the month rather than until the money runs out.”

“Doing it this way also ensures that money is used efficiently for food that goes to children first. Many schools also operate summer feeding programs from their buildings to achieve the same ends.”

Critics: Denying funds indefensible

The programs are not an either/or proposition, however. The state could take advantage of both if it chose to. While the pandemic EBT program is over and the deadline for the first 2024 summer EBT is fast approaching, says that states could opt in to the program in future years.

The South Dakota arm of the nonprofit group Bread for the World has urged state residents to ask Gov. Noem and Education Secretary Joe Graves to accept the funds for next summer.

The site-based summer food program is helpful but doesn’t touch all South Dakotans, the organization says, particularly those unable to access meal sites.

“Neither program by itself is enough to cover a child’s nutritional needs,” . “Kids need both.”

Cathy Brechtelsbauer, Bread for the World South Dakota’s leader, cited that says just 5.5% of the children who receive free or reduced price school lunch are fed through site-based programs.

Turning away funding is indefensible, according to Brechtelsbauer.

“How can they turn down food for kids who are hungry?” she said.

She was among the signatories of a Nov. 20 letter urging the state to reverse course on the EBT funds. The other name on the letter was Xanna Burg, Director of South Dakota Kids Count.

“South Dakota has not yet committed for 2024,” the letter reads. “There is still time to commit so that school-age children will not miss out on critical nutrition support during the hungriest time of the year.”

Thirty-nine other organizations are listed on the letter. Among them: Augustana University, the American Heart Association, Sioux Falls Thrive, the Boys and Girls Club of Standing Rock, South Dakota Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota.

Fury, the governor’s spokesman, told South Dakota Searchlight via text on Thursday that he stands by the administration’s earlier explanation for declining the federal funds.

Brechtelsbauer called the reference to federal requirements and administrative burdens a smokescreen.

“Forty-three other states did this, so we could figure out how to do it in South Dakota,” Brechtelsbauer said. “If we can’t, we’ve got a much bigger problem.”

School lunch debate looms for 2024 session

The question of who ought to pay to feed hungry kids has become a recurring one for lawmakers and their communities in recent years.

Earlier this week, the Sioux Falls School District announced that it had secured a donor to cover unpaid balances for 1,800 students whose parents hadn’t kept up with school lunch payments. that the debt from unpaid lunch accounts has accrued at about $3,000 a day. Without the donor, the district could have ended the year with as much as $500,000 in school lunch debt.

Moving forward, kids whose lunch accounts fall $20 in the red will be served a sack lunch. A $75 negative balance will cut off meals altogether.

State Rep. Kadyn Wittman, D-Sioux Falls, who brought a bill in the 2023 session that would have offered free school lunch to all children regardless of income, took to X (formerly Twitter) to express her consternation over news of a private donor paying off lunch debt.

“That should be the government’s responsibility,” . “It is cruel and, frankly, unbelievable that South Dakota kids can go hungry during the day if their parents fall behind on payments.”

Her bill to provide free school lunch for all failed in the House Education Committee. The Department of Education opposed the bill.

Wittman plans to introduce a “scaled back” version of the bill in the 2024 session.

“Last year’s bill was way too optimistic. I realize that South Dakota is not ready to offer free school lunches,” Wittman said.

Rather than cover school lunch for all, her new proposal would essentially offer free meals to students who currently qualify for reduced price lunches by reimbursing schools for the reduced price charges. Families whose incomes are between 135% and 185% of the federal poverty line qualify for reduced price lunch; those with incomes lower than 135% of the poverty line qualify for free lunch.

Wittman is hopeful that a coalition of supporters will help move her fellow lawmakers to support the bill, which is estimated to cost $578,916 annually – millions less than last year’s proposal.

According to a pre-session information sheet on the bill, its cosponsors will include Tyler Tordsen, R-Sioux Falls, Sen. Liz Larson, D-Sioux Falls, and Sen. Mike Rohl, R-Aberdeen.

At least one other school lunch proposal will not appear before lawmakers in 2024, however.

Rep. Fred Deutsch, R-Florence, had signaled plans to introduce a bill, , that would have paid for lunch for K-8 students who qualify for free or reduced price lunch.

Deutsch has since decided not to pursue the bill. The lawmaker told South Dakota Searchlight that concerns about a leaner budget, in her weekly column in late October, have convinced him to table the proposal for now.

“Given our budget tightness, I thought this was probably not the year to bring it,” Deutsch said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com. Follow South Dakota Searchlight on and .

TOPEKA — School lunch debt has snowballed in the year following the end of pandemic-era free meal programs. An advocacy group warns the debt accumulation could hurt and humiliate Kansas children in a .

“When Kansas kids are hungry, they can’t learn,” said Haley Kottler, director of a Kansas Appleseed campaign against child hunger. “Ensuring kids have what they need to thrive is imperative to our students’ success– in and out of the classroom.”

To create the report, Appleseed staff contacted the state’s 286 public school districts, receiving responses from about 20%. To fill in the gap, staff reviewed policies available on public school district websites, among other data sourcing.

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The report follows the end of the free federal school meals program, which paid for breakfast and lunch for students at all income levels. The program was in place from March 2020 through June 2022, allowing Kansas’ 480,000 public school children access to free meals.

Since the program ended, families in the state have experienced a six-fold increase in school meal debt. Student lunch debt reached $23.5 million in 2023, according to Appleseed. For comparison, the state reported $4.5 million in school lunch debt in 2019. Increasing inflation and economic instability during and after the COVID-19 pandemic could play a factor in the increased debt.

Approximately 41% of Kansas students were signed up for free meals through the National School Lunch Program during the 2022-2023 school year, and another 7% received reduced school meals, but families must remain under a certain income threshold to be eligible for these reduced-price programs.

For example, a family of four has to make under $39,000 a year to qualify for free meals, and under $55,500 to qualify for reduced-priced meals, the report notes.

When the debt from school meals accumulates, only about 22% on average is paid off by parents, according to . Despite low rates of payment, more than 40% of Kansans school districts use debt collection agencies, turning unpaid meal debt over to collection agencies, small claims courts, or the Kansas debt offset program— a measure that can have a long-lasting negative effect on a family.

Students themselves are singled out in the cafeteria when their families cannot afford to pay. Less than 5% of school districts in the state have documented policies allowing students with meal debt to continue receiving the same meal as fellow students.

Approximately 60% of school districts have documented policies allowing children an alternate meal, though the contents of the meal vary greatly across districts. Most districts offer either a cheese or peanut butter sandwich to these students, but others offer just a granola bar and milk, or canned fruit and crackers.

School districts that have higher rates of meal debt typically end up paying it through the district’s own funds, the report notes.

With this additional expense, many of the state’s school districts have been left in a “precarious financial position.”

“On average, it currently costs more to produce a school meal than school districts are charging or being reimbursed for,” the report reads. “This is likely an even larger challenge now that increased federal reimbursements for school meals have expired.”

The organization’s recommendations include ending debt collection practices, having the state subsidize portions of the lunch program and changing unpaid meal fee policies that humiliate students in the cafeteria.

“I look forward to working with school districts and community partners to ensure that every child in every district has consistent access to school meals, said Martha Terhaar, a Kansas Appleseed advocate campaigning against child hunger. “Together, we can build policies that guarantee every student is fed.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on and .

“We’d get something really plain like one piece of bread with one piece of fish or chicken,” Woodard told The 74. “They’d count out everything we’d get to make sure everyone had something to eat.”

The district began to change when officials introduced food trucks and live cooking demonstrations into its school meal strategy in 2019, said Woodard, 17.

“It’s a really amazing feat,” she said. “I feel safe eating the food because care is put into everything I eat now.”

Originally created pre-pandemic, the food trucks and live cooking demonstrations have contributed to the district’s hike in school meal participation for the 2022-23 school year among the nearly 50,000 students enrolled in the district’s 107 schools.

School breakfast participation increased from 22,142 to 24,612 students, and school lunch participation increased from 28,558 to 33,062 students — an 11% and 16% surge, according to the .

Food Trucks

“When we got the food trucks, I was immediately able to see and feel that shift on how students see school food service,” said Carl Williams, executive director of the district’s office of school nutrition. “It’s really elevated our program and students see us differently.”

Williams said there’s high demand for the food trucks — often causing competition among Detroit principals rushing to reserve them.

“The principals love it like crazy,” Williams said. “They’ll call me first thing in the beginning of the school year trying to get them booked.”

Williams said the district designed two food trucks, often referred to as Blue and Goldie to represent the district’s official colors, that routinely visits two of the 29 high schools each week.

The elementary and middle schools can also schedule food truck visits for special events, he said.

“The food trucks have created an abundance of options for students…and they look at us as a quality meal provider,” Williams said.

From burrito bowls to street tacos, Woodard said the food trucks are so popular she often sees her classmates go back in line for seconds.

“Of course they would,” Woodard said. “They’ll even try to be discreet about it.”

Live Cooking Demonstrations

Mike Hearn, also known as the Great Chef Mike, is one of four chefs contributing to the food trucks and live cooking demonstrations.

“It gives me so much excitement because it offers something different for our students and I’m just happy to be a part of it,” Hearn told The 74.

Hearn said he particularly enjoys running the stir fry station where he lays out all of his ingredients, from bean sprouts to bamboo shoots to various proteins, for students to see him cook.

“It really increases [school meal] participation and that’s what’s most important to make sure we don’t leave any hungry kids out there,” Hearn said.

Williams said one student told him the meals made him feel like he was “eating at a five star luxury restaurant and my response to him was ‘you deserve this type of service every day.’”

Next Steps

Kevin Frank, senior director of the district’s office of school nutrition, said the district’s school meal initiatives are unique to Michigan schools.

“We’re like a hidden gem,” Frank told The 74, adding that despite budget limits the district has been exploring more food options, such as Nigerian and Mexican dishes, to match the diversity of Detroit’s students.

“We obviously have a lot of restrictions, but our chefs are brilliant and if anyone can do it they can,” Frank said.

The hottest new restaurant in California might be your local elementary school.

Thanks to a surge of nearly $15 billion in state and federal funding, school districts are ditching the old standbys — frozen pizza and chicken nuggets — in favor of organic salads, free-range grilled chicken, vegan chana masala, chilaquiles and other treats. Districts are building new kitchens, hiring executive chefs, contracting directly with local organic farmers, and training their staffs to cook the finest cuisine. One  in San Luis Obispo County even bought a stone mill to grind its own wheat for bread and pasta.

The move to healthier, fresher school meals comes on the heels of California’s first-in-the-nation program providing free breakfast, lunch and snacks to nearly 6 million students in public schools, regardless of whether they qualify under federal income guidelines. The expansion of the meal program, combined with investments in school kitchens and training, have made public schools the , serving nearly 1 billion meals a year — more than McDonald’s, Starbucks and Subway combined.

“We now have the money and the green light to go all out. There’s no more excuses,” said Juan Cordon, food services director at Vacaville Unified, where students now enjoy offerings such as regeneratively raised pork sandwiches, Strauss Family Creamery organic yogurt and ​​chipotle chilaquiles. “Everything is turbo charged. It’s like, let’s do it fast, let’s do it now, let’s do it right.”

A plethora of research shows the benefits of healthy school meals. A 2020 study in the journal  looked at 502 school meal programs and found that students who ate meals at school had better attendance, higher academic achievement and improved health overall.  

The school meal expansion sprung from a handful of government investments during the pandemic, when the economy upended and schools closed, leaving thousands of low-income students and their families without steady access to food. The federal government expanded access to school meals for the first 27 months of the pandemic, and when that program expired, California stepped in with permanent funding for all students to receive free meals at school.

The state also created a program called , which has given $750 million to schools to upgrade their kitchens, hire and train staff and make other improvements so they could serve high-quality meals made from scratch for all students. About 90% of districts have received a grant. Another state program, called , has doled out nearly $100 million for schools to partner with local farms, plant school gardens and other projects to bolster locally sourced food in school lunchrooms. 

The switch to fresh, made-from-scratch meals has been popular with students. 

Alysa Oliver, a sophomore at Aptos High in Pajaro Unified, said that school lunches used to be so bad she’d sometimes just eat an apple, suffering through the afternoon on an empty stomach. 

“The food used to come in little plastic packages that you’d warm up, and it had this condensed, sweaty feeling,” Oliver said. “Now we have this high-quality food that’s better for you, and it tastes better.”

Enjoying a healthy meal enables her to pay closer attention in class, she said, and ultimately enjoy school more. Her favorite choices are Caesar salad, chicken wraps, berries and bananas.

Pajaro Valley Unified, in Santa Cruz County, is among the districts that’s on the forefront of the revolution in school meals. In addition to offering a daily selection of healthy entrees, the district has a partnership Esperanza Community Farms and Pajaro Valley High School  in which students harvest produce themselves, bring it back to school and prepare it for their classmates. Local farmers visit classrooms to talk about agriculture, and students learn about career pathways in the farming industry. The program has been so popular that the district is expanding to another high school this year.

The challenges of ‘farm to school’

Although more schools statewide are embracing the farm-to-school model, there have been hiccups. Staffing is a major one. School food service workers typically earn less than $20 an hour, less than a fast food worker, which means districts often struggle to fill vacancies. A recent check of , the state’s largest education job board, showed 851 openings for food service workers in California.

Another hassle for schools is paperwork. Even though the meals are free and available to all students, families still need to apply because schools need to track how many students qualify under the federal free-and-reduced-price lunch program. The federal government uses the numbers to reimburse schools for those children’s meals, and the state uses the numbers to determine funding formulas based on low-income student enrollment. 

“The school lunch program is as complicated as the U.S. tax code. It is wild,” said Jennifer McNeil, a co-founder of LunchAssist, a firm that helps school districts navigate the bureaucracy. “There are a lot of requirements and mandates that affect what goes on that lunch tray.” 

Another challenge is logistics. School kitchens typically don’t have the staff, time or room to clean and chop 500 butternut squashes, for example, so they need to send produce to a processing plant, which may be 50 miles away. Transporting the produce long distances can be expensive and inefficient, especially if it needs to be distributed to a dozen different school sites.

“I might need 30 cases of strawberries from Farmer X, and 20 cases of cucumbers from Farmer Y, and those farmers might have no way of getting their goods to different schools. It’s not easy,” said Jean Aitken, food services director at Pajaro Valley Unified. “We’re working on it, but right now we’re not set up to handle all the details.”

A need for more food hubs

Yousef Buzayan, farm-to-market senior manager at the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, an advocacy group based in Davis, said California needs more middlemen — known as food hubs — to purchase, process and distribute produce to schools. Currently, each district is forging its own arrangements, which is not practical in many parts of the state.

Food hubs could also arrange field trips, visits from farmers and other aspects of agricultural education, as well as help farmers get fair prices and a predictable, steady market for their produce. A few, such as the Yolo Food Hub, are already offering these services, but the state could use more, he said.

“Potentially, this could have a huge impact not just on students, but on farms in California generally, especially small farms,” Buzayan said. “But right now we need to think of a new business model focused just on schools.”

Getting students to love quinoa

Another thing LunchAssist helps with is the age-old challenge faced by parents everywhere: How do you get a 7-year-old to try new foods? All the innovative new programs will be for naught if kids toss their lunches in the trash, McNeil noted.

A few suggestions she offers to schools: Set up taste tests so students can vote for their favorites; educate students about nutrition, where food comes from and how it’s made; pair something new with an old favorite; and add Tajin seasoning, which can make anything taste good, she said.

Some districts are paying close attention to what students eat at home, and creating menus that reflect families’ diverse culinary traditions. The idea is to give students food they already enjoy while exposing them to new cuisines. Chefs at several districts vouched for the power of peer pressure: Kids are more likely to try something new if they see their friends eating it.

At Mt. Diablo Unified in Contra Costa County, the district hired an executive chef, Josh Gjersand, who’d previously worked at fine dining restaurants in San Francisco and the East Bay. He chose to work in schools, he said, because of the regular hours, rewards of serving children and the funding available to be creative and ambitious.

One of his first tasks was to survey students about what they want to eat. They asked for halal meat, Latin American and Asian specialties and vegan options. So he came up with a menu featuring entrees like chana masala with chickpeas, organic rice, wheatberries and chutney; birria with locally processed, grass-fed beef; and fish filet tacos with slaw.

“The students like to be part of the conversation. By asking them what they like, where they’re from, it shows we’re paying attention and listening to them,” he said. “It’s amazing, the feedback we’ve been getting. It’s the best feeling.”

Humboldt County has a unique approach to serving “culturally relevant” school foods. Nearly 10% of students there are Native American, so the County Office of Education is offering meals — and curriculum — based on local native foods such as fish, berries and acorns. 

“I started here 27 years ago and it’s exciting to see these changes, the positive impact on students and staff,” said Linda Prescott, the County Office of Education nutrition program director. “And we’re definitely seeing the economic impact on farmers. I think it’s making a difference in Humboldt.”

The fine art of cooking was central to a training last week at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa, one of the top cooking schools in the country. About three dozen school cafeteria workers from two districts in San Luis Obispo County gathered for a two-day training — paid for with state grants — on how to roast a sirloin, make grilled salmon with orange-thyme butter, braise greens and make other delicacies.

Renee Williams, who’s been in food service for 14 years at San Luis Coastal Unified, said she was a little daunted by the whole scene: the special CIA aprons, the fancy gas stoves, the huge glinting knives. 

“I’m not really a cook. Before, we just defrosted stuff,” Williams said. “This is all new and a little scary. But I want to learn.”

‘A circular economy’

First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who’s long advocated for improved school meals, checked in on the new chefs as they learned to julienne carrots and make the perfect roast potatoes.    

She views the state’s investment in school nutrition as transformative for students, small farms and local economies. In five to 10 years she hopes to see food hubs well established throughout the state, and all schools participating.  

“(My vision is that) we reach every public school kid in California, and have influenced the regenerative agricultural movement in California in such a way that most farms are practicing climate-smart agriculture,” Siebel Newsom said. “The small- and medium-scale farmers will benefit because they’ll have guaranteed buyers, and local economies will blossom. It’s a circular economy.”

The next steps, she said, are tackling food waste by establishing composting systems, and teaching students how to plant and cook their own food. 

“Talk about awesome summer school,” she said. “We all have to eat. It’s such a gift to know how to cook, and take something seasonal from the garden or the stream and turn it into something that you can then share with other people, break bread, have a conversation and connect and come together as a community.” 

This story was originally published by .

This is not an imaginary scenario — these lessons and activities are happening at real schools around the world. And the lessons their students are learning, both formal and informal, as they follow their own curiosity, are invaluable as they grow as stewards of our future. We can see it in how two schools, in particular, approach climate change.

set out to build the most sustainable school on the planet. Indonesia is an archipelago with 180 million people living in coastal regions. It faces the imminent threat of rising sea levels and is no stranger to weather-related disasters. Green School Bali is a much-needed inspiration for environmental education far beyond its borders. Students at this international school actively learn about sustainable agriculture, renewable energy systems and ecological conservation, applying fundamental literacies such as critical thinking and writing. They demonstrate what it means to be .

A continent away in Hungary, addresses similar concerns in a different way by focusing on alternatives to dangerous, unsustainable agricultural practices. The school opened a vegan cafeteria that supplies delicious, locally-sourced food for school lunches and the public. Students have a voice in the menus, are involved in the food planning and learn valuable lessons about supply, demand and food sources. By providing families and community members with tasty vegan food, the school encourages the community to lower its meat intake, thus decreasing the need for unsustainable farming practices. 

I saw this all first hand last year, during a 12-month transformational journey exploring innovative educational practices in 34 countries on six continents. I approached this exploration as a life-long educator and co-founder of , a diverse-by-design high school in the heart of Memphis, Tennessee. Here, students use in all of their classes to make education more meaningful, often in collaboration with nonprofits and researchers.

For my tour, I wanted to see what commonalities exist among innovative schools worldwide. I also wanted to see how world events like political shifts, war, youth movements, human migration and climate change affect teaching and learning.

As an educator committed to preparing students for an uncertain future in a swiftly evolving world, my main focus was learning how schools across the globe approach similar goals: namely, how they’re helping students become generous collaborators and original thinkers — all while mastering foundational knowledge and fundamental literacies. These guide teaching and learning at Crosstown High and in other innovative, student-centered . 

For more ideas on rethinking the high school experience, read The XQ Xtra — a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Student-Led Innovation Creates Sustainable Schools 

Around the world, schools embody the same learner outcomes we use at Crosstown and other XQ schools to prepare students for these immense challenges. 

“Change starts with an idea, an intention or a problem to be solved,” said Green School Bali Principal Sal Gordon. School educators tasked their students with researching the greatest environmental impacts on their local school community. Through an extensive study of numerous factors, students identified automobile traffic on campus as a leading contributor. With the help of engineers, chemists and automotive experts, students developed a process to convert school buses from diesel to cooking oil for fuel, which they collected from local restaurants. 

Each week, students in the “Grease Police” procure the oil from a 15-mile radius of the school for refinement and use as fuel, providing a greener alternative to school transportation. Through this kind of project-based learning and hands-on experiences, they gain a profound understanding of the interconnectedness between their actions and the environment. 

The school’s entire facility encourages this type of learning. Each open-air classroom is constructed of bamboo and thatch, with tables and chairs made locally from sustainable products. Students also manage their own lush gardens at each grade level that provide food for school lunches. They eat fish grown in the student-managed aquaponic system and eggs harvested from the fifth-grade chicken coop. 

In Hungary, REAL School Budapest Founder Barna Barath intentionally designed the vegan cafeteria to serve as a living example of the school’s purpose. In a traditional school system, a common purpose is to prepare students for postsecondary opportunities that provide individual prosperity. At REAL, the purpose is to live a purposeful and fulfilling life for collective prosperity. Students and parents invest in that vision for the betterment of the community. REAL’s educators are creating a community space and showing what it means to be learners for life and generous collaborators.

Connect Student-Directed Learning to Academic Standards

Educators at schools anywhere can prepare students for an uncertain future, specifically where that uncertainty relates to environmental change. A key takeaway from the two schools in Indonesia and Hungary is letting students take the lead in their learning. In each case, students investigated problems and found solutions, resulting in deep learning. There are many examples of schools doing similar work in the U.S. At Crosstown High, science teacher Nikki Wallace lets students take the lead by connecting them with local researchers through powerful community partnerships. 

We need to think big. Assigning simple projects around collecting plastic bottles or bags isn’t enough to move the needle on the environment and won’t truly engage kids. Even though Indonesia has specific concerns about rising sea levels, schools anywhere can — and should — engage students in learning about and studying the effects of droughts, heatwaves, floods and storms that result in crop failure and food scarcity. Here are a few steps to get started:

• Get students to think audaciously about solving local problems. What’s the big issue facing their neighborhood, town, county or state? How can they learn about it? Who can help them uncover solutions? For example: What is the condition of the local water source? What in the community is impacting local water? Who in the community can share expertise around this issue? 
• As they problem-solve, consider all connections to academic standards. How do research and problem-solving by students connect to the learning standards in your state? This is the crucial jumping-off point for connecting “academic” knowledge to “real world” solutions. At Crosstown High, we’ve done an in-depth study of human migration involving people who immigrated to Memphis. This project closely relates to the standards covered in our history, geography, sociology and psychology courses. 
• Get outside the box. Keep asking, “Why?” and push your students to think bigger and broader before zeroing in on the small tasks. At Crosstown, our students conducted an in-depth project on how life could exist on Mars. This encompassed everything from food sources, water, breathable air, transportation and architecture. They used persuasive writing and research — touching practically every subject area.

Unlock Students’ Passion and Curiosity

Helping students find the urgency and passion in learning, and the joy of finding a solution, are key components to solving increasingly urgent local and global issues. But they’re also the ingredients we need to make learning, in general, more engaging and relevant to high school students. Our high schools can and should do a better job cultivating students’ natural passions and curiosities, helping them discover how their unique gifts, talents and interests help them meet the challenges of an uncertain future. Understanding their place in that future builds the confidence needed to be a change-maker.

Luckily, students are naturally forward-focused. They constantly think about what life will be like when they grow up. We can improve the high school experience by activating their natural curiosity and augmenting it with essential skills such as critical thinking, creative problem solving, information gathering and collaboration.

All of these skills are necessary for college, career and the real world. By combining passion, urgency, curiosity and essential knowledge and skills, our students can grow into the superheroes our planet needs to lead urgent and necessary change on the local, national and global stages. Schools around the world are setting examples, and we can, too. 

Want more ideas for making your high school more student-centered? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of The 74.

That’s when the district began experimenting with vending machines as a school meal option.

But what began as a short-term, pandemic-era fix to alleviate cafeteria lines later transformed into a way to spark excitement and increase student participation in school meals.

“It’s trendy, it’s new, it’s different, and that, of course, grabs students’ attention,” Sommer Purvis, supervisor of child nutrition programs at the Livingston Parish Public Schools, told The 74.

As districts across the country adjusted to the absence of federally funded school meals in the 2022-23 school year, many saw a decline in student participation. 

But Livingston Parish Public Schools experienced an uptick.
School breakfast participation increased from 10,746 to 11,023 students, and school lunch  participation increased from 18,669 to 19,233 students — a 3% surge, according to the .

Purvis credited creating options for reimbursable school meals, such as the vending machines, for the district’s continued growth in student participation.

Serving students’ meals from vending machines compared to a traditional cafeteria line creates “the perception of offering something different and healthier even though both meet the same regulations,” Purvis said.

From club sandwiches to a variety of fresh salads made in-house, the vending machines sell out more than 150 lunches a day at the district’s four participating schools.

The district also regularly asks for student feedback, and began including vegetarian and vegan lunch options.

The vending machines are not only popular among students, but have also helped ease labor shortages among the participating schools’ cafeteria staff.

“It’s helped during serving time being able to disperse some students to other areas as opposed to them all coming in through the cafeteria lines,” Purvis said.

Livingston Parish Public Schools child nutrition program coordinator Chancy Vaughn noted how the cafeteria staff have responded positively to the changes.

“A lot of work does go into the front end of it but you make up for it on the back end,” Vaughn told The 74. “When lunch time starts, the workload is less because the [vending] machines operate by themselves.”

Vaughn said the vending machines are connected to the school cafeteria’s payment system, so students can decide where they prefer to use money from their accounts.

“The students love it a lot, they really do,” Vaughn said. “They love having the options…and I think if we gave them even more options they would love it even more.”

12th grader Taylor Purvis said his classmates enjoy the convenience, especially if the cafeteria lines are too long.

“It opened up a lot of new opportunities for everybody,” Purvis told The 74. “A lot of students like it and it’s very convenient.”

As the 2023-24 school year begins, Vaughn said the district plans on expanding the meals offered in the vending machines.

“If we brought in more vending machines, they would be utilized,” Vaughn said. “The students really enjoy and look forward to using them.”

Of the 91 large school districts surveyed, accounting for more than 6.5 million students, participation in school breakfast and lunch decreased by more than 100,000 and 250,000 students respectively.

In particular, school breakfast participation dropped from 1.84 to 1.74 million students, and school lunch participation dropped from 3.61 to 3.36 million students — a decrease of 5% and 7% respectively.

“The return back to normal school meal operations, which a number of the districts that participated in the survey had to do, really did negatively impact school nutrition operations,” Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school time programs at the , told The 74.

Experts said participation declines came from young families whose children entered school during the free meals for all era unaware of how and where to fill out the proper forms when the federal program expired.

Experts also pointed out flaws in the free or reduced-price meal eligibility system some districts had to default back to.

For instance, a student from a household of three is eligible for free lunch if they made $32,318 or less in annual income and for reduced-price lunch if they made $45,991 or less, according to set for the 2023-24 academic year. 

“It’s really tone deaf to the fact that people who might be above the free or reduced-price category could still be struggling middle class families,” Joel Berg, chief executive officer at , told The 74.

Large districts were defined as having an enrollment greater than 7,000 students — from more than 7,000 students in California’s Inglewood Unified School District to nearly 1 million in the New York City Department of Education.

Other districts include Los Angeles Unified School District, San Diego Unified School District, Chicago Public Schools and District of Columbia Public Schools.

Of the 91 districts surveyed, five were in states that have independently funded free school meals for all and 28 implemented the Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP — a program that allows schools with high poverty rates to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students.

The remaining 58 districts went back to their tiered eligibility system where students had to qualify for free or reduced-price meals — thus contributing to the drops seen in student participation. 

FitzSimons said the drops were not as dramatic as they could have been because a handful of the districts surveyed prioritized maintaining pandemic-era meal operations as much as they could afford.

However, FitzSimons noted rising food prices, labor shortages and supply chain disruptions among other operational challenges contributed to the struggle districts faced to provide students’ healthy school meals.

“School districts were really struggling with the changes and with so many of the operational challenges that had been taking place throughout the pandemic,” FitzSimons said.

91% of districts reported rising food prices as their topline issue, in addition to 86% that struggled with labor shortages and 85% that struggled with supply chain disruptions.

Other operational challenges include increased school meal debt, communicating changes to the school meal programs when the federal program expired and low student participation.

Matthew Essner, vice president of state nutrition at , said problems communicating changes to the school meal programs was a widespread issue.

“When schools went back to the traditional meal setting, access and people even understanding that they were required to fill out those forms was a bit confusing,” Essner told The 74. 

FitzSimons added how labor shortages and the number of school lunch lines “negatively impact kids being able to get food quick enough.”

FitzSimons also noted how supply chain disruptions impacted schools’ ability to serve a variety of healthy school meals, which decreased students’ desire to participate in the meal programs.

“[Healthy school meals] generate excitement, particularly with older kids, because we do see participation in the programs decrease as kids get older,” FitzSimons said.

So far California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico and Vermont have acted to independently fund free school meals for all students.

As momentum grows, FitzSimons said statewide legislation as such is the most viable way to ensure every student has access to healthy school meals. 

“We need to be looking at Healthy School Meals for All as the way to operate school nutrition programs,” FitzSimons said. “It changes the whole culture of the school cafeteria.”

From balancing a packed schedule to not always having the means to buy groceries, Brownlee is grateful her Virginia school continued to provide free breakfast and lunch for all students despite the expiration of federally funded pandemic school meals at the start of the 2022-23 academic year.

“I don’t have one of those stay-at-home mom lives where I’m able to pack their lunch every day,” Brownlee told The 74. “So even if I know the food isn’t everything they might want, it’s at least something to get them through the day.”

Although Virginia has not passed free school meals legislation in the absence of the federal program, Virginia and many other states are now participating in the , or CEP — an Obama-era program that allows schools with high poverty rates to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students.

According to a report from the , CEP participation soared in the 2022-23 academic year with 40,235 schools nationwide taking part — an increase of 6,935 schools, or 20.8 percent, compared to the previous year.

CEP began through the where any district, group of schools or individual school with 40 percent or more students eligible for free school meals can participate.

Today, 19.9 million children across the country attend a school that has CEP — an increase of nearly 3.7 million children, or 22.5 percent, compared to the previous year.

Participation rates vary significantly state-by-state, from nearly 100 percent of eligible schools in Wyoming, California and the District of Columbia to under 30 percent of eligible schools in New Hampshire, Colorado and Kansas.

Crystal FitzSimons, the director of school and out-of-school time programs at the Food Research and Action Center, said CEP participation has grown in almost every single state.

“Most schools did not want to go back to the way school nutrition programs operated prior to the pandemic so they really leaned into community eligibility,” FitzSimons told The 74.

Cheryl Johnson, the director of child nutrition and wellness at the Kansas Department of Education, said the state’s low 28.8% CEP participation stems from how it negatively affects schools’ finance formula.

“Many school districts are hesitant to move away from using meal applications because it can greatly impact their at-risk funding for students,” Johnson told The 74.

Johnson added how schools participating in CEP lose important student data from no longer having to fill out applications for those receiving free or reduced price meals — thus causing schools to potentially receive less funding from the state.

But FitzSimons said Johnson’s concerns are not the case.

“A lot of times school districts would distribute Title I funds using free and reduced price eligibility, but they don’t have to do it that way,” FitzSimons said. “When community eligibility passed, the U.S. Department of Education actually came out with guidance to help districts come up with ways to distribute these funds among their schools.”

A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. 

Allie Pearce, a K-12 analyst at the Center for American Progress, added how schools shouldn’t shy away from CEP because there is a need to change how schools structure their finance formulas.

“Free and reduced price eligibility is an imperfect measure of students’ socioeconomic status but it’s the predominant one that’s used,” Pearce told The 74. “We really need to move away from free and reduced price eligibility as this proxy measure and move towards other measures that are more representative of students and their families.”

Pearce recommends schools look at household income, students’ Medicaid participation and neighborhood poverty rates from the U.S. Census Bureau among other data points.

“There are a lot of things we can use, and it probably makes the most sense to use a mixed measure as much as possible since that will paint a clearer picture,” Pearce said.

Frank Edelblut, the New Hampshire Education Commissioner, noted how the state’s low 14.3% CEP participation comes from having few schools eligible.

“It’s just hard to get a whole broad swath of schools that are going to participate because they don’t qualify,” Edelblut told The 74.

To address this concern, the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed a rule in March 2023 to lower the CEP eligibility threshold from .

“This proposed rule will make CEP available for about 20,000 more schools,” a USDA spokesperson told The 74 in an emailed statement. “USDA estimates that about 2,000 schools with roughly 1 million children enrolled will opt into CEP because of this rule.”

But Pearce strongly believes “the logical and equitable next step is a universal system full stop.”

“Expanding community eligibility now is needlessly regressive when it comes to the pandemic era waivers we’ve already offered,” Pearce said. “It doesn’t address the ongoing meal debt burdens or some of the longstanding struggles associated with the meal application process in schools.”

Johnson agreed, adding that despite Kansas’ low CEP participation, free school meals for all students would be a “win-win” situation. 

“It would reduce paperwork and reduce stigma dramatically within the state if universal free meals were ever considered by Congress,” Johnson said.

Kerri Link, the nutritions program supervisor at the Colorado Department of Education, said the state addressed the low 27% CEP participation by passing free school meal legislation starting in the upcoming 2023-24 academic year.

Colorado now joins California, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico and Vermont that have acted to independently .

Until statewide measures transition to federal investment, Pearce said CEP participation still serves as an incremental step forward.

“It may not go far enough to meet the needs of schools across the country, but in general, it’s a great step towards free meal access for more students,” Pearce said.

Despite overwhelming support from the Rhode Island Senate, free lunch and breakfast for all public school children will likely not be available, according to state legislators.

The Rhode Island Senate voted on May 16 in favor of the federal government doesn’t already cover — with opposition coming from Senate Republicans.

Rhode Island Democratic senator Jonathan Acosta said momentum to offer the meals will likely end once the bill is presented to the House of Representatives.

“Nobody wants to be the asshole to say ‘no we’re not going to feed kids at school’ so my guess would be that the House will protect itself by avoiding a public vote,” Acosta told The 74.

LeeAnn Sennick, communications director for the Rhode Island Senate minority office, declined The 74’s request for comment on Acosta’s remarks.

According to the , of the state’s 137,452 public school students, more than 70,000 receive a free or reduced-price lunch; and around 29,000 receive a free or reduced-price breakfast.

During the pandemic, the federal government funded free school meal programs for children throughout the country. The program expired at the start of the 2022-23 school year, leaving state governments to decide whether to pick up the cost. 

Rhode Island House of Representatives communications director Larry Berman told The 74 in an emailed statement “there is no money in the budget that just passed the House Finance Committee in regards to free lunch and breakfast” for all public school children.

The House of Representatives began to vote on the state budget Friday and will adjourn on June 30th.

Acosta said the House of Representatives has other spending priorities, such as funding housing. 

According to the , California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico have funded universal school meals after federal funds ran out.

Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Nevada have passed temporary legislation in the absence of continued federal investment.

“Hunger is one of the very first things that needs to be addressed. It’s one of the biggest barriers to learning and one that’s honestly pretty easy to solve,” Allie Pearce, a K-12 education policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, told The 74.

Under set for the 2023-24 academic year, a student from a household of three is eligible for free lunch if they made $32,318 or less in annual income and for reduced-price lunch if they made $45,991 or less. A student from a household of six is eligible for free meals at $52,364 or less in annual income.

“Those are just students that we know have filled out applications or that have been directly certified,” Pearce said. “There are probably so many more students that have not been able to fill out those applications or their families are in difficult or uncertain financial situations and may not qualify.”

The bill, sponsored by Acosta, would require Rhode Island public schools to provide free lunch and breakfast to all students instead of requiring them to only provide meals for those covered by the federal government.

“With the pandemic we saw a rise in economic and food insecurity across our state,” Acosta said. “We’ve started moving back to this world where we saw the issue of lunch shaming…so in light of that we picked up where some of these folks left off and introduced this legislation.”

Pearce noted that deprioritizing free school meals will do a disservice to all Rhode Island public school students, especially those who receive reduced-price meals.

“Those students will continue to have to pay a lesser amount but one that adds up for sure,” Peace said. “It also doesn’t work to address the stigma a lot of students go through when it comes to the meal debt that they may accrue.”

Rhode Island Republican senator Jessica de la Cruz has argued this bill is unnecessary because children from low-income families already receive free school meals.

“What you are doing is financing free lunches for the affluent,” Cruz told . “I would be in favor of widening the eligibility, but I cannot support the lunches of the affluent.” 

Rhode Island Republican senator Gordon Rogers agreed with Cruz.

“I’m not against feeding children and kids that need it in school,” Rogers told . “This will cost the state of Rhode Island [up to] $40 million, not just one time, but continuing, escalating forward.”

In the meantime, Acosta is hopeful conversations around free school meals will be revived in the coming year.

“The people in our state are our most valuable asset and the more that we develop them the better the returns are going to be for all of us,” Acosta said.

The lion’s share of Hoosier schools that qualify for don’t take advantage of it, according to a new national report.

Across the country, 6,419 school districts — 67.5 percent of those eligible — adopted the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) in one or more schools for the 2022– 2023 school year, the (FRAC) reported in a .

But in Indiana, only 40.6% of eligible school districts — and 51.7% of eligible schools overall —  adopted CEP in the most recent academic year.

Although Indiana was among the 39 states that saw an increase in the number of schools adopting community eligibility, the Hoosier state still ranks 47th in the nation for CEP participation.

The program allows schools with high poverty rates to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of their economic status. Child health advocates and education experts laud the federal provision as a benefit to both students and school administrators.

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No Kid Hungry, a non-profit organization that focuses on increasing access to healthy meals for children and alleviating childhood hunger, emphasized that kids are more attentive in class, have better attendance and are less likely to have disciplinary problems when their nutritional needs are met.

With CEP, families with tight food budgets are also ensured that their child is getting two balanced meals at school, reducing financial strain at home.

The program works for schools, as well, by eliminating school meals applications and unpaid meal charges that often create administrative burdens.

Some schools have recently adopted CEP as a way to continue offering healthy meals to all students — free of charge — after the expiration of the pandemic child nutrition waivers last year, according to FRAC.

But researchers said that many schools, including some in Indiana, choose not to participate out of fear that losing data from school meal applications may also result in the loss of Title 1 funding.

Indiana schools and districts have until June 30 to submit a CEP application for the 2023-24 school year. It’s not clear how many new applications have been submitted so far.

By the numbers

During the 2022–23 school year, there was a significant increase in the number of schools and districts nationwide participating in community eligibility, according to FRAC’s latest report.

While the number of participating schools in Indiana increased, too, the take-up rate among eligible schools overall decreased slightly.

Of the 1,148 schools eligible for CEP in the last school year, 593 participated, according to federal data collected by FARC. That’s up from 506 participating schools in the 2021-22 academic year, when 957 schools qualified.

Among those to join were in Indianapolis, which serves nearly 11,000 students.

Of the 469 eligible Indiana schools where more than 60% of students qualify as high-need under CEP guidelines, 311 participated in the federal program in the 2022-23 school year — a 66.3% adoption rate.

About 52% of Hoosier schools with 50-60% high-need students — 200 of the 356 eligible schools — signed up. Participation dropped to 24.5% for those schools with high-need student enrollment at or below 50%; of the 323 schools that were eligible, only 77 took advantage of the program.

The Indiana Department of Education estimates that at least 1,100 schools will qualify for CEP in the 2023-24 academic year.

How CEP works — and why it helps

Families are not required to submit an application for the community provision like they would for the free and reduced meals program. That guarantees free breakfast and lunch for any student at a participating school.

Indianapolis Public Schools, as well as the surrounding Perry, Warren and Wayne school districts, are continuing to offer free meals – both lunches and breakfasts – to students through CEP for the 2023-24 school year. Certain MSD of Lawrence Township schools are also participating in CEP to provide free meals.

Thousands of students at other Indianapolis-area schools — in the Decatur, Franklin, Speedway and Washington school districts — will not automatically get free food, though.

Some district officials they do not participate in CEP because of the federal program’s “complexity,” while others noted that their schools do not qualify for complete meal reimbursement, meaning districts have to pay out-of-pocket to cover the rest.

For a school to qualify for the CEP, at least 40% of the individual school’s enrolled population must already participate in another means-tested program or are part of a protected group, such as students experiencing homelessness, in foster care, or migrant students.

Schools that meet the minimum threshold to qualify for the community provision receive reimbursement for 62.5% of meals served, according to federal guidelines. Schools with enrolled populations over 62.5%, where nearly two-thirds of students fall into the above categories, get fully reimbursed for students’ meals.

Schools with higher numbers of students in need receive a near or total reimbursement for meals, which makes community eligibility a more financially viable option. That also makes them more likely to participate in community eligibility, according to FRAC.

While any school with an enrolled population of 40% or more can participate, many schools on the lower end of the scale “fear participating” because the level of reimbursement from the federal government would not fully cover the cost of all meals served to students, said Allyson Pérez, a child nutrition policy analyst with FRAC.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

Schools nationwide received federal COVID-19 relief money to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students at the height of the pandemic. But those funds when Congress .

Now, individual states are figuring out how to move forward.

Oregon has taken a few steps forward and a few steps back this legislative session when it comes to plans to feed the state’s 550,000 students.

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would have created a permanent pot of money for universal school meals but it was reduced to a task force before its first hearing, with lawmakers claiming not all schools could scale up that quickly.

Rep. Courtney Neron, D-Wilsonville, who chairs the House education committee and is one of the bill’s seven chief sponsors, said it was difficult to curtail the proposal.

“We understand how critical it is for all children to have adequate nutrition, and we want to make that (happen) as soon as possible,” she told the House committee earlier this month.

As it stands, the bill calls for a recommendation by the task force by September 2024 of how to implement universal meals statewide. It is scheduled for a committee vote on Wednesday. The Oregon Department of Education estimates it would cost between $145 million to $377 million to do so in the 2023-25 biennium.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture last week announced a new proposal that could significantly increase the number of Oregon schools that qualify for federal reimbursements for meals.

Importance of meals

The Oregon Food Bank estimates more than 114,000 children in Oregon live in households that struggle to afford food. Having access to enough nutritious food can have a big impact on a child’s ability to socialize, focus on their studies and perform academically.

“ shows that students who eat breakfast and lunch at school do better,” said Matt Newell-Ching, senior policy manager for the Oregon Food Bank, when testifying to state lawmakers on March 15. “It’s kind of odd that we treat school meals differently than we treat other key educational elements within the school environment.”

Oregon has been a leader among states when it comes to food access in schools, and in recent years, it’s doubled the number of students who get it.

In the past, about 25% of Oregon schools provided free breakfast and lunch to all students. They did so because they qualified for federal assistance. Now 55% do, thanks to the passage of the state’s Student Success Act in 2019, which is partly dedicated money for meals.

In some cases, entire districts feed students. Salem-Keizer Public Schools – the second largest district in Oregon with more than 40,300 students – is the largest district in the state to offer universal meals.

About 84% of Salem-Keizer students are considered to be . But proponents of these programs say helping all students reduces the stigma around hunger and poverty.

Other states

Some states – Colorado, California and Maine – have permanent, universal school meal programs. And at least 21 states are drafting similar legislation this session, including Minnesota lawmakers, who advanced the day before Oregon’s first hearing for House Bill 3030.

Additionally, starting in the 2023-24 school year, will automatically qualify for free or reduced-price school meals.

But what Oregon lawmakers and advocates are paying the most attention to is the U.S Department of Agriculture’s new proposal, released last week, which would expand the number of schools that are eligible to get federally reimbursed for providing meals via the , also known as CEP.

The provision allows the nation’s highest-poverty schools and districts to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students without needing applications. Schools are reimbursed using a formula based on the percentage of students eligible for free meals because of their participation in other benefit programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently to expand support for and access to school meal programs, including awarding $10 million in grants for schools to expand nutrition education and a that would lower the threshold for schools to gain access to federal funding.

Advocates say these changes could allow hundreds more schools in Oregon to provide universal meals, but the state will still need to pay more to cover the gap between what the districts, state and federal governments each contribute.

such as the Oregon Food Bank are support an omnibus spending bill, , to allocate more money from the state’s general fund to the Oregon Department of Education to help cover these costs and incentivize schools to take advantage of the new offerings.

House Bill 5014 had a public hearing last Thursday before the joint subcommittee on education. It is not yet scheduled for a work session.

“I have lots of optimism that there is momentum growing for universal school meals in Oregon,” Newell-Ching told the Capital Chronicle. “It’s no longer a question of if we’ll get there, but (when).”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Gov. Tim Walz on Friday signed a bill to provide free breakfast and lunch to all Minnesota students at eligible schools.

Walz signed the bill surrounded by lawmakers, community advocates and young students at Webster Elementary School in northeast Minneapolis. The second-term DFL governor lauded how universal meals will help make Minnesota the best state in the country to raise a child — one of Walz’s key budget priorities.

“This bill puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up, and I am grateful to all of the legislators and advocates for making it happen,” Walz said in a statement.

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The majority of Minnesota schools receive federal funding from the National School Lunch Program, which reimburses schools for each meal served, though it doesn’t cover the cost of the entire meal. Under the new law, schools are prohibited from charging students for the remaining cost, and the state will foot the rest of the bill — about $200 million annually.

Lt. Gov Peggy Flanagan in an emotional speech talked about her experience growing up with food insecurity, noting that about one in six Minnesota children don’t always have enough to eat.

“To our decision-makers who believe they have never met someone who is experiencing or has experienced hunger — Hi, my name is Peggy Flanagan, and I was one in six of those Minnesota children who experienced hunger,” she said.

Flanagan was referencing a now- from the state Senate’s debate over the bill earlier this week. Sen. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, questioned on the floor whether food insecurity was actually an issue in Minnesota.

“I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry,” Drazkowski said before voting against the bill. “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat.”

Minnesota is now the fourth state, including California, Colorado and Maine, to implement universal free meals for students. Walz said more funding for education is coming and that his administration is “just getting started.”

“The big stuff is still coming,” Walz said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on and .

Following the that allowed K-12 schools to provide school meals free of charge to all students, from the National Center for Education indicates that many school nutrition programs are facing lower participation rates.

Between March and October 2022, the percentage of public schools with more than half of students participating in school meals dropped from 84% to 69%. Schools reported other challenges, including convincing parents to submit applications for free- or reduced-price meals (34%), staffing shortages (32%), and increased program costs (29%).

Research points to a that school meals can support, including a reduction in food insecurity, improved dietary intake, and improved health metrics. Improving participation in school meals also strengthens school nutrition programs, who largely depend on from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to cover staffing, food purchases, and kitchen equipment.

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The announced on Dec. 7 that it is providing two school districts — and — with grants to kickstart out-of-the-box ideas that will aim to increase participation in school meals programs.

Each school system is receiving $25,000 to implement their ideas, and the grants are supported by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina.

Craven County Schools will pilot a special vending machine program in two high schools where reimbursable meals and healthy snacks will be provided. The district hopes that this extra service options will decrease long cafeteria lines and give students another chance to grab a school meal or snack after school, before they head to extracurriculars or athletic practices.

In Wilson County, three high schools will have revamped menus that aim to provide more attractive options for students. This will include fresh grab-and-go meals for students who arrive later or leave early, have limited time to wait in line and eat, or are tempted by nearby fast food restaurants. Cafeteria serving lines will also have more space for fresh fruits and vegetables.

“School nutrition programs are the most effective tool we have in the fight against child hunger,” said Lou Anne Crumpler, director of the Carolina Hunger Initiative, in a press release. “These creative ways of removing barriers between students and school meals will go a long way toward creating healthier communities.”

Editor’s note: The Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina supports the work of EducationNC.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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 The 74, 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.”