Pat Broz has been serving meals to students in the Mehlville School District outside of St. Louis for nearly 30 years. On a recent day at Oakville Elementary School, the kindergartners bouncing slide drives to the register were all dressed up for school pictures. He complimented their outfits as he called out their lunches.
However, this year, Broz said fewer students are coming through her line compared to when school lunches were free for all students.
“There were a lot more kids,” he said. “Everyone wanted breakfast and lunch.”
Her observation is confirmed in the national data. When the program was free last year, schools served more than 80 million more meals compared to the year before the pandemic.
Broz has noticed something else – when he calls the kids, he sees that they owe money for meals they haven't paid for. In fact, students in her district are about four times more in lunch debt than they typically were before the pandemic.
These changes would be alarming in a single district, but they are trends that are multiplying in school districts across the country.
This school year began with an abrupt shift from pandemic-era free meals to a paid system. As the months pass, school districts across the Midwest are reporting signs that families may be struggling to afford school lunches.
Now lawmakers from the state level to the highest levels of government are looking for ways to fix a growing problem. Some states have passed universal free lunches for students, and many others are considering similar legislation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently proposed an expansion to a free lunch program to try to feed significantly more students in high-need schools.
Brian Munoz
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Public Radio St. Louis
Signs of trouble
Now that families must pay for lunches again and low-income families must apply to qualify for free or reduced-price meals, schools are seeing cracks in the system.
The Mehlville school district is back to serving as many meals as before the pandemic, but the number of students who qualify for free and reduced-price meals has dropped from 30 percent to 26 percent, said Katie Gegg, director of school food and food services in the area.
“Which doesn't sound like a lot, but with a district of 10,000 students, that's 400 students that might need the support,” Gegg said.
Just as these small changes add up for many children in the Mehlville School District, the changes across the country also add up. Preliminary data for the national lunch program show that schools served nearly 130 million fewer free or reduced-price meals in the fall of 2022 compared to the same time period just before the pandemic.
This year, school officials say meal debt is reaching unprecedented levels. ONE recent research from the School Nutrition Association found that school districts had more than $19 million in unpaid lunch debt, with the Midwest and Great Plains reporting the highest rates of lunch debt.
In the Sioux City Community School District in Iowa, students currently have about $22,000 in debt. Rich Luze runs nutrition for the region and said the government could have handled this change better.
“Giving it for two years, or whatever, and then stopping it abruptly, instead of phasing it out … that could have helped families prepare to adjust and rethink,” Luze said.
School nutrition professionals and experts say certain trends have led to fewer families qualifying for subsidized or free meals. Many families didn't know they had to reapply after two years of automatic free meals. Gegg in St. Louis also said the app can be confusing, especially for the many families in her area whose first language is not English.
Furthermore, a few years of growth The wages could have pushed some families out of the program. To get free meals this year, a The family of four must earn less than $36,000 a year. Although the USDA adjusts that number for inflation, food and housing prices are rising, said Crystal FitzSimons, director of the Food Research and Action Center.
“These put a huge strain on the household food budget and on household budgets overall,” FitzSimons said.
Policy solutions
Policymakers are looking at these changing numbers and looking for ways to get closer to free meals in the pandemic era.
California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico have all passed legislation to make school lunches free for all children. Other states have passed temporary legislation and many most people think alike policies.
The Biden administration is also looking for solutions. The USDA proposed a new rule to extend something called the Community Eligibility Provision. It allows schools and districts with many high-needs students to serve free meals to all their children. The USDA wants to lower the threshold for high-need students from 40 percent to 25 percent, allowing more schools to qualify for the program.
“We're providing more flexibility, more participation in the program, resources that take some of the pressure off,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said while announcing the plan at a school in Greeley, Colorado.
Before the pandemic, about one in three school districts in the US already served free meals to all students through community eligibility. FitzSimons says this proposal could bring even more.
“This is really great because it increases the number of schools that can choose to offer free lunches to all of their students,” FitzSimons said. “… but it doesn't actually increase the amount of federal funding the school will receive. So we're still hopeful that maybe Congress would make additional funding available.”
President Joe Biden has requested $15 billion over the next 10 years in the 2024 budget to fund expanded access to the community eligibility program. The administration says this will expand the program to an additional 9 million children.
Because states or schools must currently fund these programs themselves, not all eligible districts choose to participate. In the US, approx 75% of eligible schools chose to adopt the program last school year, and some of the states with the lowest adoption rates are in the Midwest.
Brian Munoz
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Public Radio St. Louis
In Nebraska, about 12 percent of eligible schools participated in the program last year, the second lowest rate in the U.S.
The Nebraska Legislature has several bills to try to implement universal free school lunches. Like some other states that have tried to do this, the policies try to incentivize more school districts to sign up for the community program, to maximize the amount of federal funding schools receive.
State Sen. Elliott Bostar, a Democrat who represents part of Lincoln and sponsored one of the bills, said the biggest hurdle in his state will be price. Of the state legislature estimates of fiscal analysts the policy will cost more than $55 million in the first year.
“It is my responsibility to convince my colleagues in the state legislature that this is a worthwhile investment for Nebraska to make in its students and families,” Bostar said.
Bostar said he believes free meals during the pandemic have proven the value of a program like this.
“It's hard to raise a family these days, it's expensive,” he said. “And so anything we can do to make it a little bit easier to lighten the load or lighten the burden is worth it.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Katie Gegg's name.
This story was created in collaboration with Harvest Public Media, a partnership of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. He reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues. Follow Harvest on Twitter: @HarvestPM.
