Americans Like It, Congress Ended It: Free School Lunch For All
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, politcs reporter Ximena Bustillo, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It is edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is Frank. I'm at the rim of the Grand Canyon and it is dawn. I'm here with my |
| 0:05.2 | adult children and some friends and we're about to celebrate my 60th birthday by hiking down to |
| 0:10.5 | the Colorado River and back up again today. This podcast was recorded at 12.17 pm on March 30th |
| 0:18.0 | opening day 2023. Thanks may have changed since you hear this but we'll be planning our next hike. |
| 0:23.2 | Enjoy the show. Happy birthday. Hey there it's the MPR Politics podcast. I'm Miles Farx. I cover voting. |
| 0:32.8 | I'm Hemenabustian. I cover politics and I'm Mara Liason, National Political Correspondent. |
| 0:38.1 | And today we're going to focus on school lunches. During the pandemic all public school students |
| 0:43.3 | got to eat at school for free thanks to legislation that was passed by Congress during the pandemic |
| 0:48.7 | but ahead of this school year lawmakers in DC chose not to renew that program. Hemenab you've been |
| 0:54.8 | reporting on this. This is a really important issue that affects kids all over the country. Can you |
| 0:59.4 | just explain how the program worked? Schools were going through a lot during the pandemic and so |
| 1:05.2 | Congress passed a couple waivers to allow the agriculture department to make giving meals and |
| 1:12.7 | serving school lunch and breakfast a lot easier. Everything from not requiring that kids eat in |
| 1:19.9 | quote congregate settings like cafeterias which is a federal requirement. Nutrition requirements |
| 1:25.9 | were waived because supply chains were shot and schools often couldn't get the necessary food. |
| 1:31.7 | And one of the things also was providing free breakfast and free lunch. So free meals for the |
| 1:39.5 | students regardless of if their family would normally qualify for that. And that's because usually |
| 1:47.3 | students are either paying a full price which can range from $2 to $6 depending on honestly your |
| 1:53.9 | school for lunch and for breakfast or they pay a reduced price or they get them for free. And it's |
| 2:00.4 | all dependent on these federal income requirements that exist across the board for everyone. |
| 2:07.8 | And those federal income requirements are pretty low generally right? Yeah they're pretty low. |
| 2:13.5 | So for the upcoming school year a family of four cannot make more than $39,000 a year to qualify |
... |
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