The biggest threat to school lunch and school breakfast, the federally funded programs that feed more than 30 million pupils daily, is legislation that doesn’t exist at the moment but could easily be proposed as a deficit-cutting tool, says the School Nutrition Association. The group, which speaks for school food directors, put opposition to block grants at the top of its list of congressional goals this year.
Newly elected SNA president Doug Davis called block grants “our No. 1 threat” during a warm-up session with members ahead of Capitol Hill visits today. “We are seeing a lot of calls to cut things to bridge what is now a $20 trillion (national) debt.” Block grants for school food programs could appear as a rider on budget bills, he said, pointing to repeated suggestions for cuts in social welfare programs.
Under a block grant, states would receive a predetermined amount of money each year for school meals. States could divert the money to other uses, warned Davis, and the yearly allotments would not keep pace with inflation or rising participation in the food programs. The result would be skimpier meals or stricter limits on who qualifies for free or reduced price meals. “Increasing school meal participation becomes a liability!” said a SNA summary. Davis announced a “Stop the block” campaign, boosted by the website stopblockgrantsnow.org, to head off consideration of block grants for school food programs.
The Republican-controlled House Education Committee approved a child nutrition bill in May 2016 that included a three-state block grant, which would have removed most federal regulation over meals served in those states. A bloc of Tea Party Republicans on the committee wanted to replace school food programs with a nationwide block grant. Congress has not considered an overhaul of child nutrition programs, which cost $22 billion a year, since then.
School lunch, the oldest of the child nutrition programs, school lunch, was created in 1946 “as a measure of national security to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation’s children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other food.” The program is open to all students although it increasingly is patronized by low-income children who qualify for free or reduced-price meals. In 2017, only a quarter of participants paid full price for their meals.
During a brief speech at the SNA conference, Deputy Agriculture Secretary Steve Censky proposed more flexibility for small school districts, those with less than 2,500 students, in hiring school nutrition directors. “Small and rural school districts will no longer have to overlook qualified food service professionals because of one-size-fits-all standards that don’t meet their needs.”
The USDA said it would accept comments for 60 days on a regulation to allow schools to hire people with less experience in food programs than now required. A requirement for “school nutrition program experience” would be replaced with “relevant food service experience,” with schools being allowed to count volunteer or unpaid work, such as apprenticeship in a community organization, as relevant food service experience. States would be given discretion to allow districts with less than 500 students to hire applicants for a new director position if they have the minimum required education but not the required number of years of food service experience.
In a Federal Register notice, the USDA estimated there are 6,500 school districts with from 500-2,500 students. Districts with small enrollments “often struggle to find applicants with school nutrition experience,” says the USDA. Many applicants have experience as managers or chefs at restaurants or health care facilities but have not worked in school food programs.
The 2018 position paper is available here.