Participation in federally funded summer nutrition programs, which provide meals for low-income children when school is out of session, is down by 10 percent since 2015, said the anti-hunger Food Research and Action Center in a report today. Work in Congress to update USDA’s child nutrition programs “provides an important opportunity to turn this situation around and increase access to summer meals by ramping up investments in them,” said the nonprofit group.
Some 2.86 million children received meals through the nutrition programs in July 2018, compared to 3.19 million in July 2015, a drop of 331,000 children, or 10 percent, according to FRAC data. July is the benchmark for summer meals because it is the busiest month for the programs. The three-year downturn that began in 2016 ended four years of growth in participation.
The author of the report, titled “Hunger doesn’t take a summer vacation,” said a combination of factors, rather than a single cause, was probably behind the decline in participation. Crystal FitzSimons said “aggressive” efforts are needed at the federal, state and local level to recruit sponsors for summer meals but organizations complain of too much paperwork for a short-lived operation. Bad weather has depressed attendance at outdoor sites, she said, and there are fewer sites serving meals.
In summer 2018, participation was down by 171,000 children from 3.03 million the previous summer. There were 48,699 meal sites, 99 fewer than in 2017.
“There are simply not enough summer enrichment programs that are available or affordable for low-income families to participate,” said the report, noting that meal sites frequently operate alongside educational and enrichment programs.
Congress has moved slowly and quietly this year on overhauling child nutrition programs, which cost $23 billion a year; school lunch is the biggest of the programs. Senate Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts, who will retire at the end of 2020, told Bloomberg that he hoped to see committee approval of a child nutrition bill before the August congressional recess. Negotiations in the House have been hobbled by disagreements over nutrition standards for school food, said the news agency.
The legislation “should make investments in the summer nutrition programs to increase access to summer meals while doing no harm to the current structure of the program,” said FRAC. It suggested five improvements: A lower poverty threshold for offering the meals, streamlining the paperwork for community organizations that offer summer meals, allowing meal sites to serve three meals a day instead of the current two, transportation grants to expand the reach of the programs, and more money for “Summer EBT” cards that provide low-income families with a monthly benefit to buy food for their children.
Summer meals come from two sources, a “seamless summer option” of the National School Lunch Program and the Summer Food Service Program, and are available at sites where at least 50 percent of the children in a neighborhood are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals, where at lest 50 percent of participating children are individually determined to be eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, or that serve primarily migrant children.
Roughly one in seven of the children who eat free or reduced-price school meals also takes part in the summer food programs. The District of Columbia has the highest participation rate, 34.5 percent, followed by Vermont, Maine, New York and New Mexico, said the FRAC report.
Around 30 million students participate daily in the school lunch program and nearly 15 million a day take part in the school breakfast program. School lunch was created after World War Two to assure all school children access to a nutritious meal.
The report will be available here.