When the Senate Agriculture Committee votes this week to reauthorize child-nutrition programs costing $22 billion a year, the bipartisan, five-year bill will have the support of the anti-hunger community and school-food operators. It could mark the end of months of acrimony over school-lunch reforms inaugurated by the 2010 child-nutrition bill, although the House Education Committee has yet to lay out its reauthorization bill. Both the School Nutrition Association and the Food Research and Action Center expressed support for the Senate bill, albeit with some reservations. There is no additional funding for the programs, which range from school lunch to the Women, Infants and Children food program.
The White House was not expected to comment until it reviewed the bill. There were signals last week of support from First Lady Michelle Obama or her advisers. The Agriculture Committee posted the text and a section-by-section description on its website on Monday.
An aide to Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts said the bill focuses on “increasing integrity and efficiency of the programs, modernization of programs, and flexibility and preservation of nutritious meals and summer meal programs.” The committee scheduled a mark-up session for Wednesday.
The School Nutrition Association, which criticized the 2010 school-food reforms as unduly expensive and restrictive, said the Senate bill “eases operational challenges and provides school meal programs critical flexibility” in areas such as whole grains, salt, fruit and vegetables, and food sold a la carte. Under the bill, 80 percent of grains served at schools would have to be “whole grain rich,” instead of the current 100 percent; schools would have two additional years, until 2019, to meet Target 2 standards for lowering the amount of salt in food; the USDA and the Centers for Disease Control would write guidelines to confirm the safety of, and encourage the use of, salad bars and “sharing tables”; and the USDA will convene a working group to recommend exemptions from restrictions of a la carte sales of foods high in salt, fat or calories.
The SNA said it will continue to seek higher reimbursement rates for school food.
“We are pleased to see the bill takes a number of steps in the right direction,” said the antihunger group FRAC. “Yet, the bill also reveals that our work is not finished. In particular, a new verification framework featured in the bill could threaten to increase the number of eligible low-income children who could lose access to healthy school meals.”
Error rates for the school lunch and school breakfast programs are unacceptably high, the USDA said last May — 15.8 percent for school lunch and 23.1 percent for school breakfast, affecting $2.7 billion during the 2012-13 school year. Schools are responsible for assessing which students are eligible for assistance, accounting for meals served, and for accurately reporting their operations. Errors can occur anywhere along the bookkeeping chain, from when students are certified for or denied financial assistance, when a tray of food is counted as a reimbursable meal, or when the number of reimbursable meals is tallied.
The biggest area for error, involving 10 percent of spending, is during certification, when schools decide if students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. One in five children was assigned to the wrong category, whether free meals, reduced-price meals or ineligible.
Under the bill, a limited number of states would be allowed to issue EBT cards to families whose children receive free or reduced-price meals during the school year so they can buy specified foods at retail stores. It also streamlines paperwork for groups running after-school and summer food programs. Summer food programs reach only a fraction of students who participate in school lunch and breakfast programs.
The bill also allows an additional snack for children in day care for more than nine hours a day, and allows children to receive WIC benefits up to age 6 instead of the current cutoff of age 5.