The end of universal free school lunch
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2022
⏱️ 20 minutes
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Summary
Today on “Post Reports,” we talk about the end of a grand experiment: universal free school lunch. The program started to address childhood hunger early in the pandemic, but it's set to expire at the end of the summer.
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For many school administrators, providing universal free meals has been a no-brainer.
“The reason we like this program is that it takes all the shame out of all the kids that eat free lunch,” said Donna Martin, a school nutrition director in a rural county in Georgia where kids have had universal free lunch for years under a provision that allows districts with high concentrations of poverty to feed every child for free. “You try not to identify them, but everybody knows who eats free lunch. So, in my community, everybody eats lunch and there's no shame.”
Education reporter Moriah Balingit explains what this program did, and why it’s going away now, despite how popular it is among schools.
“The pandemic became sort-of this policy laboratory to try out things that a lot of progressives have wanted for a long time, like the Child Tax Credit and universal free lunches. And I think there was some hope, some optimism that these programs would continue. But, of course, as we saw with the Child Tax Credit and now we're seeing with the free lunches, they are being allowed to expire because there's not the political will to continue them.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So they have smoothies and pancakes and chicken biscuits and cheese grids and this is Donna Martin. |
| 0:09.8 | She's a school nutrition director in Burke County, Georgia. |
| 0:12.8 | We have 63% of our children on food stamps, which means all our kids eat at no cost and |
| 0:19.0 | we serve breakfast, lunch after school snacks, supper, summer feeding. |
| 0:25.2 | Children are very lucky to be well fed. |
| 0:29.0 | The kids in Donna's County have gotten free meals at school for a long time now. |
| 0:33.6 | That's thanks to this government program called the Community Eligibility Provision and it |
| 0:38.5 | lets districts with high concentrations of poverty offer free meals to every kid. |
| 0:45.2 | During the pandemic, as more and more kids became food and secure, Congress did something |
| 0:50.2 | new. |
| 0:52.0 | It expanded free lunch to every student as part of the CARES Act. |
| 1:00.4 | School administrators were hoping they could continue to offer free meals to every kid at |
| 1:04.8 | least for another year, but now, universal free school lunch is set to abruptly end, which |
| 1:11.6 | Donna says is a shame. |
| 1:13.6 | My philosophy is I need to provide these teachers with kids ready to learn and in order for them |
| 1:19.0 | to be ready to learn, they have to have breakfast, they have to have lunch, they have to have |
| 1:23.2 | supper or an after school snack if they're there for tutoring. |
| 1:27.0 | And kids cannot learn on an empty stomach. |
| 1:29.6 | We need to look at this program just like we look at every other part of education, busing, |
| 1:36.0 | teaching, books, computers, all of those things. |
| 1:39.8 | It's all the same thing. |
| 1:47.8 | In the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
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