Pandemic-fighting waivers that allow schools to serve meals for free to all students will expire on June 30, House and Senate appropriators agreed on Wednesday, despite a campaign to continue universal free meals in the upcoming 2022-23 school year. An anti-hunger advocate said that millions of children will “face a hunger cliff when they lose access to summer and school meals.”
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was a strong opponent of extending the USDA waivers through the new school year, which would cost an estimated $11 billion. In addition to no-cost meals, the waivers said schools would be reimbursed for each meal at a higher-than-standard rate and gave food directors more leeway in meeting targets for serving healthy foods.
“The loss of child nutrition waivers will devastate school meal programs, impacting millions of students and working families who increasingly depend on our meals,” said Beth Wallace, president of the School Nutrition Association, which speaks for school food directors. Extension of the waivers was the top priority of the SNA, which held its annual legislative conference in Washington this week.
House and Senate negotiators omitted funding for the school waivers while drafting a mammoth bill to fund the federal government through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. The House, first to act on the omnibus appropriations bill, ran into a pothole over Covid-19 funding on Wednesday evening, but that was not expected to delay passage of the package for long. The Senate would act after the House passes the omnibus bill.
A USDA survey conducted last fall found that schools expected higher food prices, limited supplies, and labor shortages to continue into the 2022-23 school year. Ninety percent of schools employed the waivers this school year to serve meals for free.
“These waivers have been critical in supporting nutrition operations so that children have access to school, after-school, and summer meals throughout the pandemic, and they are still needed to help schools and families recover from and respond to the economic, health, and educational fallout,” said Luis Garcia, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group. Expiration of the waivers will cause “millions of children to face a hunger cliff when they lose access to summer and school meals.”
Another anti-hunger group, Share Our Strength, said, “Today, Congress failed our kids by not clearing the path for USDA to extend critical child nutrition waivers. While we are all hoping for a return to ‘normal,’ there’s nothing normal about the environment schools are operating in right now.”
The appropriations bill would extend, at a cost of $834 million, the so-called WIC bump of enhanced benefits to buy fruits and vegetables through Sept. 30. The “bump” more than tripled the amount available each month for fruit and vegetables and moved WIC households toward 50 percent of the daily fruit and vegetable consumption recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
“Since April 2021, more than 4.75 million women and children participating in WIC have received enhanced fruit and vegetable benefits in accordance with science-based recommendations,” said the National WIC Association. “The WIC benefit bump is one of the most effective investments to build nutrition security for low-income families.”
Also in the appropriations bill were $26.8 billion for child nutrition programs such as school lunch, $550 million for the expansion of rural high-speed internet, and $2.2 billion for food aid overseas.
A Senate Appropriations Committee summary of agricultural funding in the omnibus bill is available here.
The House Appropriations Committee summary of agricultural provisions is available here.