More than three dozen Democrats in the House and Senate proposed a dramatic expansion of U.S. spending on school meals to provide free meals for all students, not just low-income children. “What we’ve seen during this pandemic is that a universal approach to school meals works,” said Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a lead sponsor. “We cannot go backwards.”
The legislation goes far beyond President Biden’s proposal to make the summer meals program available to all school-age children and to make it easier for schools in high-poverty areas to serve meals for free to all of their students. And it is more expansive than House and Senate committee leaders have suggested.
Lawmakers hope to update USDA’s suite of child nutrition programs this year for the first time since 2010. Budget austerity and ideological differences waylaid efforts for the past few years.
Child nutrition programs, headlined by school lunch, cost around $25 billion a year. Before the pandemic around 30 million of the nation’s 51 million public-school students participated in the lunch program daily; two-thirds of the meals were served free of charge to low-income children. Around 15 million children ate breakfast at school each day; nine of 10 of those meals were free.
In response to the pandemic, the USDA authorized schools to serve school meals for free to all students. The Biden administration extended those “flexibilities” through June 30, 2022. It also increased the federal reimbursement rate to schools for each meal served, helping offset the financial strain on school food directors.
The legislation, backed by Sanders, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, would make available permanently free breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack to all pupils, eliminate school meal debt and encourage schools to buy food produced locally. An additional nine senators and 26 representatives are co-sponsors.
“No child in the richest country on earth should face hunger,” said Omar. “Families across Minnesota and nationwide are still struggling from the fallout of the pandemic and children are often bearing the brunt of this crisis.”
Groups supporting the bill include the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the School Nutrition Association and the Children’s Defense Fund.
Besides adoption of universal free meals, the legislation would raise the per-meal reimbursement rate to schools to $2.72 for breakfast and $3.81 for lunch and dinner. That is in line with the actual cost of producing the food, said sponsors. Last July, the USDA set the maximum reimbursement for this school year for breakfast at $1.96, for lunch at $3.68 and for snacks at 96 cents in the continental United States. The reimbursement for paid lunches was 41 cents and $3.28 for reduced-price lunches.
Under the bill, schools would get an incentive of 30 cents per meal if they buy at least 25 percent of their food from local sources. If all schools met the threshold, it would mean $3.3 billion in additional income per year for local farmers, said a summary of the bill.
“There are a lot of pieces to this,” said Senate Agriculture chairwoman Debbie Stabenow in a recent discussion of child nutrition reauthorization. She said she hoped to enact a child nutrition reauthorization by the end of the year. “It will be a while.”
For a summary of the “Universal School Meals Program Act,” click here.