essay on why school lunches should be free

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What are the benefits of free school meals? Here's what the research says.

Despite being a highly developed nation, the U.S. is experiencing a rise in children experiencing poverty and hunger — a rise that could be reduced by ensuring that every student receives free meals at school, experts say.

A recent report from the Census Bureau reveals that the child poverty rate skyrocketed from  5.2% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022 . One catalyst for this shift was the expiration of the  enhanced version of the child tax credit program , which offered parents a yearly tax credit (and some much-needed financial relief) to help offset strains like  rising unemployment at the start of the pandemic . The temporary pandemic-era Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)  benefits , which millions of families were relying on, also  expired  this year, while federal school meal waivers ended in 2022.

Activists say that losing these resources has undermined the progress made toward helping families in need.

“ Last year’s annual report  saw a record decrease in child poverty because of these expansions,” says Teddy Waszazak, the universal school meals campaign manager at  Hunger Free Vermont . “[It] shows just how important and effective programs like the child tax credit, universal school meals and SNAP are in reducing poverty and hunger.”

Stripped of these crucial supports, many parents are struggling to feed their families and depend on free school meals for their children. So why is the concept of  universal free school meals  still so controversial?

What the research says about school-provided meals

Better health and more food security:  A 2023  study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics  found that children who received onsite meals and snacks provided by their child care center had higher chances of being food-secure, were more likely to be in good health and had lower odds of being admitted to a hospital from an emergency department than those eating meals and snacks from home.

Improved performance at school:  A 2021  report from the Brookings Institution  analyzed the impact of a program that offered schoolwide free meals and found an improvement in math performance (particularly among elementary and Hispanic students) at school districts where few previously qualified for free meals. Researchers also saw a significant reduction in suspensions among certain students.

Improved test scores and no negative impacts on weight or BMI:  A  report from the Center for Policy Research at the Maxwell School  reinforces the findings that  universal free meals have a positive effect  on the English language arts and math test scores of all students. Researchers also found no evidence that universal free meals cause any increase in student weight or body mass index.

What support for free school lunch looks like

In 2021,  California  and  Maine  became the first two states to  pass legislation for universal free lunches  at public schools. This school year, six others joined them: Minnesota,  New Mexico , Colorado, Vermont,  Michigan  and  Massachusetts . But it doesn’t end there.

“Right now, we know at least 25 states have either formed coalitions or introduced legislation for free school meals,” says Waszazak, noting that both  Connecticut  and  Nevada  are working to extend their school meal programs. Illinois, meanwhile, passed legislation to provide free school meals, though there’s been  concern over how schools can provide those meals  without additional funding.

And in other areas, like at Broward County Public Schools in South Florida, there are  ongoing pilot programs  making sure students don’t go hungry.

“Universal free breakfast has been in place since 2014. It was successful right away, and it increased the number of kids that ate breakfast with us,” says registered dietitian Casie Maggio, program manager for nutrition education and training at Broward County Public Schools, the sixth-largest district in the nation. This year they’ve adopted a universal lunch pilot program, and she says they’re already seeing more students enjoying school lunches.

Why it matters

Experts say that providing free school meals is vital not only from a financial perspective, but from a health standpoint too.

“There have been numerous studies that have concluded that students perform better academically, behaviorally and emotionally after consuming nutritious meals during the school day. We see this in our schools every day,” Maggio tells Yahoo Life.

“The lack of consistent access to adequate quantity and quality food for a healthy, active life has been shown to increase risks for iron deficiency anemia, asthma, tooth decay, stunted growth and overweight due to intake of high-calorie foods that are low in vitamins and minerals,” says  Krystal Hodge , an assistant professor in food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Hodge says hunger keeps students from being able to focus on learning.

“In a study of 500 low-income parents and their children ages 13 to 18 conducted by  No Kid Hungry in 2017 , 59% of the children surveyed reported coming to school hungry,” says Hodge. “Research has shown that students at nutritional risk are more likely to skip breakfast, and have poor attendance, to be late [and] to show behavioral problems in school.”

Hodge says a big challenge that remains is that many families who aren’t eligible for income-based assistance still need help obtaining food, including school lunch.

“Offering universal free school meals reduces financial and social barriers to participation, including the stigma associated with receiving free meals that can be negative, even at this age,” she notes.

So what does it take to ensure all schoolchildren are fed?

Every school district and every state has a different process to go through to pass universal school meals, but persistence, collaboration with other vested interests and a vast well of research and data seem to be the most important factors.

“It took four years for the Vermont legislature to pass a permanent universal school meals bill. But Hunger Free Vermont, the School Nutrition Association of Vermont and the Vermont Farm to School Network had been collaborating for a decade before that to lay the groundwork for this effort,” says Waszazak. That groundwork included research and data-gathering to prove that universal meals reduce child hunger while yielding better outcomes for students and even improving local farm economies.

Although a bill was introduced just before the pandemic, state-level advocacy in Vermont slowed down when the federal government stepped in to fund universal meals for all students across the nation. Vermont activists were able to extend the universal school meals program for another year to gather data about the positive impact on students and the state as a whole, which later helped convince the legislature to pass the now permanent program.

Waszazak says the most prevalent criticism of the program is that it provides free meals to affluent families who can afford to pay. He disagrees for a number of reasons, including that universal school meals are one key piece of education equity.

“We do not ‘means’ test for students to have access to [other school resources], nor should we for school meals,” he says.

What can parents do?

To the parents, educators and activists who are hoping to bring universal school meals to other areas, Waszazak says: “Organize and build coalitions! It was much more than a student issue — we engaged teachers, school nutrition professionals, school boards, principals and superintendents, farmers, pediatricians, parents and more. This allowed us to build a campaign that was rural and urban, in schools and out, and tri-partisan.”

Parents who don’t qualify for free or reduced lunch  are still encouraged to apply , as this helps determine how much funding schools receive and how many meals they can subsidize. Those who can afford to do so can also  help wipe out school lunch debt .

Hodge recommends parents write letters to their school’s superintendents and congressional representatives. She adds, “If there is an opportunity to be part of your school’s wellness committee, this is a great opportunity to allow your voice to be heard.”

It’s for our common good: School meals should be free for all students

In 2020, the federal government initiated an unprecedented experiment to feed every schoolchild in the United States, in response to the explosion of need brought on by the absence of a social safety net at the onset of the Covid pandemic. After declining in 2021, food insecurity rose for U.S. households in 2022 to levels equivalent to the earliest days of the pandemic. Despite this reversal, Congress allowed the program to expire on June 30, 2022, even as food prices had increased by more than 10 percent over the previous 12 months.

With 12 million American children struggling with hunger, educators and other student advocates warn that going back to the pre-pandemic norm is untenable. A recent School Nutrition Association  survey found nearly all school nutrition directors were concerned for the solvency of their programs. So once it became clear that Congress would abandon the measure, advocates  across the country began creating state-level models. But the federal government needs to step up to establish a minimal standard of care for all children. And Catholics should support universal free school meals both because it aids the poor and because it promotes the common good.

With 12 million American children struggling with hunger, educators and other student advocates warn that going back to the pre-pandemic norm is untenable.

Moral arguments aside, a 2021 review of 47 studies on the impact of free school meals makes it clear this is good public policy. Most found that universal free lunch programs boosted overall diet quality, food security and academic performance. Researchers also found that free school meals may be associated with a boost in household income among low-income families.

Currently, the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program, which provide free and reduced-cost meals to schoolchildren, are means-tested. That means school meals are free for a family of four with a gross annual income below $36,075, and discounted for families of four earning less than $51,338. But a household of four attempting to buy eggs, pay rent, and by some miracle find adequate child care is poor even with an annual income well above $51,338.

One might reasonably wonder if the solution to food insecurity is to simply expand eligibility for these programs rather than universalize them. But universal benefits are more efficient as they lower administrative costs for school districts (which no longer have to determine eligibility for free lunch programs), and they remove hoops that the poor have to jump through. These administrative costs often make means-tested programs  more expensive than universal ones. And universal free school meals do not prevent affluent parents from packing meals or extra goodies for their children. It does, however, enforce a minimum standard of care for all children, regardless of socioeconomic status.

Universal benefits are more efficient as they lower administrative costs for school districts, and they remove hoops that the poor have to jump through.

Dividing most Americans into the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor obscures an undeniable fact about the life of the American working class as a whole: We are not O.K. Half of American workers made less than $35,000 in 2019, and most of us are struggling to make ends meet. Feeding America, a national network of food banks, reported last year that 53 million people sought help from food banks, pantries and other programs in 2021, up by one-third from pre-pandemic levels. Working-class millennials and Generation Xers, who by now have lived or worked though two national economic emergencies in 25 years, are familiar with this shared vulnerability.

Finally, an understatement: Moms are tired. An important contributing factor is the persistence of an unequal distribution of domestic labor by gender. American norms around domestic labor have not caught up to the reality that just before the “she-session” brought on by the lack of protections geared toward female workers in the first years of the pandemic, women accounted for a  slight majority of the American workforce. Despite this, a Gallup survey from 2020 found that 59 percent of women reported they are likely to have greater child care responsibilities than their partners, and in a Pew Research Center survey from 2021, the same percentage of women said they were burdened with a greater share of household chores, with 74 percent saying they had more responsibility for managing their children’s schedule and activities.

Moms are tired. An important contributing factor is the persistence of an unequal distribution of domestic labor by gender.

According to a  January 2020 study by Oxfam’s Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women in the United States spend an average 5.7 hours per day maintaining the household, more than two hours above the average for men. That difference is the equivalent of two more workdays per week! Notably, wealth did not protect women from this disparity; it only lessened it.

This tax on women’s time, health and capacity to devote their efforts elsewhere is a social problem that cannot be solved household by household. Social problems demand social solutions that match the proportion of their harm.

Our collective investment in the common good permits us to live fuller lives and contribute to society. I don’t have to exhaust myself blazing a fresh trail to the office every morning thanks to our shared investment in roads. We can also expand the individual capacities of mothers by making collective contributions to this basic need of all children.

At the  signing ceremony for the National School Lunch Act of 1946, the legislation that created the National School Lunch Program, President Harry S. Truman began his remarks by situating it within a set of shared interests common to all Americans: “Today, as I sign the National School Lunch Act, I feel that the Congress has acted with great wisdom in providing the basis for strengthening the nation through better nutrition for our school children.” The National School Lunch Act, as its proponents saw it in 1946, promoted the common good.

Every president claims that his legislative priorities are in the national interest. But in Mr. Truman’s case, this was more than convenient framing. Malnutrition was a major reason the Selective Service rejected millions of draftees during  World War II . This was a costly lesson in the depths and consequences of our shared interests. To advance the common good today, free school breakfast and lunch programs need to be universalized. Catholics interested in promoting this core tenet of our social teaching should support state-level efforts as a stopgap, but they should also pressure their federal legislators to make school meals a universal public benefit.

[Read next: “ What can bring together pro-life Republicans and progressive Democrats? Expanding the child tax credit .”]

Dwayne David Paul is a Catholic educator and writer based in Connecticut.

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Offering free lunches for all students: Financial impacts on schools, families and grocery stores

As lawmakers discuss the pros and cons of schools offering free lunches and breakfasts to all students, regardless of income, it's important to know what the research says about the financial impacts.

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by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist's Resource September 19, 2022

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Anti-hunger and child advocates have pressed state and federal legislators for years to allow all students, regardless of household income, to eat free lunches and breakfasts at school.

But the national call for universal free school meals has grown louder and more widespread amid news reports about school cafeteria workers shaming children with unpaid lunch debt and a growing body of research demonstrating the benefits of eating school meals , which must meet federal nutrition standards .

For 70-plus years, kids from lower-income families have been able to apply for and receive free or reduced-price meals under the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act , which President Harry Truman signed in 1946.

In 2014, the federal government increased the number of children receiving free meals by allowing schools in high-poverty areas nationwide to provide breakfast and lunch to their entire student population at no charge.

The option became available under the Community Eligibility Provision , a part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 that was phased in over several years. Schools can serve all students free lunches and breakfasts if more than 40% of their students have been identified as low income, homeless or being in foster care.

During the 2019-20 academic year, 26 million students — 52% of public school enrollment — were eligible for free or reduced-price meals, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers various child nutrition programs, waived eligibility requirements for free school meals, allowing schools to serve meals to all students at no cost. But the option to provide free meals during the regular academic year expired at the end of June.

On June 25, President Joe Biden signed the Keep Kids Fed Act of 2022 , which, among other things, gave kids access to free food over the summer.

Schools in California, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada and Vermont will continue providing universal free school meals because lawmakers in those states decided to pick up the tab for expenses the federal government will no longer cover. Colorado might join them. In November, Colorado residents will vote on Proposition FF , which would establish a program allowing students statewide to eat for free at public schools.

As elected leaders in other parts of the U.S. consider adopting universal free meal programs, a key question they will likely ask is how the change will impact people’s pocketbooks. It’s important for journalists to know what the research says about the financial consequences for school districts, local businesses and households with and without children.

Below, we’ve gathered and summarized several academic studies published in recent years that investigate these issues. We plan to add new research as it becomes available.

For additional context, you may find it helpful to read a recent analysis examining universal free school meal programs’ effects on youth in areas such as academic achievement, health and school attendance. The paper, “ Universal School Meals and Associations with Student Participation, Attendance, Academic Performance, Diet Quality, Food Security, and Body Mass Index: A Systematic Review ,” synthesizes the results of 47 studies conducted in the U.S. and other countries.

For more background, check out our roundup of research, “ School Meals: Healthy Lunches, Food Waste and Effects on Learning .” One of the studies we included suggests kids might eat more of the fruits and vegetables served with school lunches if lunch were scheduled after recess.

The National Center for Education Statistics is a good resource for data on the number and percentage of U.S. students eligible for free and reduced-price meals. There’s substantial variation by state. In New Hampshire and Delaware, fewer than 30% of kids qualified in 2019-20 compared with more than 70% in Mississippi, New Mexico and the District of Columbia.

Free lunches and breakfasts: Impacts on local businesses and households

The Effect of Free School Meals on Household Food Purchases: Evidence from the Community Eligibility Provision Michelle Marcus and Katherine G. Yewell. Journal of Health Economics, July 2022.

When schools provide free lunches and breakfasts to all kids on campus, area households spend less money on groceries and lower-income families buy more nutritious food, this study indicates.

Food purchases decline by an estimated $11 per month, on average, among households with children located in the same zip code as the school offering universal free meals — regardless of whether those children attend that school, according to the analysis, conducted by Michelle Marcus , an assistant professor of economics at Vanderbilt University, and Katie Yewell , an assistant professor in the University of Louisville’s department of health management and systems sciences.

When Marcus and Yewell looked specifically at households with children who likely attend the school offering free meals, they found those families’ food expenditures fall as much as $39 a month, on average.

The researchers used data from the Food Research & Action Center and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to identify U.S. schools that participated in the Community Eligibility Provision program after it s implementation nationally in 2014. To better understand how much money different households spend on food and what they buy, Marcus and Yewell examined data from the Nielsen Consumer Panel Dataset , which includes a variety of information collected annually from a panel of 40,000 to 60,000 U.S. households. The researchers looked at data gathered from 2004 to 2016.

Another key takeaway: The researchers learned that when a school introduces a universal free meals program, lower-income households with children located in the same zip code buy healthier foods. Marcus and Yewell write that they found “suggestive evidence of an improvement in their overall dietary quality by about 3 percent.”

The researchers did not investigate the causes of these food shopping changes. They suggest households that benefit directly from free school meal programs probably spend less money on breakfast and lunch foods.

They also discovered that offering universal free meals encourages more lower-income students to eat school meals. Not all kids who qualify for free food based on household income will participate in the National School Lunch Program. But a larger percentage of children who qualify for free meals based on income will eat free school meals when they’re offered to all students.

This indicates “the stigma of free school meals may be declining after universal access,” Marcus and Yewell write.

School Food Policy Affects Everyone: Retail Responses to the National School Lunch Program Jessie Handbury and Sarah Moshary. National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2021.

When schools offer free lunches and breakfasts under the federal Community Eligibility Provision, it “causes households with children to reduce their grocery purchases, leading to a 10% decline in grocery sales at large retail chains,” this working paper finds. Grocery stores respond by cutting prices.

“A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the annual direct benefit of the [National School Lunch Program] for a household with children amounts to a 25% reduction in shopping costs,” write the authors, Jessie Handbury , an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sarah Moshary , an assistant professor of marketing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The two researchers studied the effects of schools offering free lunches and breakfasts to all students by examining three sets of data. The National Center for Education Statistics provided data on U.S. schools that offered free meals under the Community Eligibility Provision from 2013 to 2016. The Nielsen Company’s Homescan project provided data on household food purchases from 2011 to 2016. The researchers also examined grocery prices and sales from 2011 to 2016, obtained from Nielsen’s Scantrack , which tracks data on weekly sales of individual products for more than 20,000 grocery stores nationwide.

Handbury and Moshary find that after a school introduces universal free meals, “households with school-aged children take fewer trips to and spend less money at grocery stores, especially large retail chains.”

Their analysis also suggests “stores near schools that are all eligible for the [Community Eligibility Provision] earn 2.9% lower revenues than those neighboring ineligible schools,” the authors write. “Estimates are larger in magnitude if we focus on the sales of lunch meats.”

Handbury and Moshary learned that individual chain grocery stores do not reduce prices in response to a local school introducing a free-meals-for-all program. Rather, retail chains adjust prices across stores as a response to multiple schools providing universal free meals in communities their chain stores serve.

“Consequently, some consumers enjoy lower prices even when their local school does not adopt the program,” the authors write.

How school spending, finances are affected

Universal Free Meals Associated with Lower Meal Costs While Maintaining Nutritional Quality Michael W. Long, Keith Marple and Tatiana Andreyeva. Nutrients, February 2021.

The per-student cost of school meals dropped at large and medium-sized schools in the U.S. after they launched universal free meal programs, according to this study, which also finds the dietary quality of their school meals did not change.

At large and medium-sized schools serving 500 students or more, the full cost of providing free breakfasts to all students was $2.92 per child, on average. Large and medium-sized schools that did not participate in the program spent an average of $3.49 per pupil.

Lunch costs also fell. The full cost of providing lunches was $4.83 for each student at medium and large schools after they started feeding all kids on campus. Similarly sized schools that did not offer universal free lunches spent $5.50 per student, find the researchers, Michael W. Long ,  an assistant professor in the George Washington University Department of Prevention and Community Health; Keith Marple of Brandeis University; and Tatiana Andreyeva , director of economic initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut.

The paper’s authors write that they had expected per-student costs to drop at medium and large schools due to economies of scale achieved by feeding larger numbers of children.

To measure potential changes in meal costs and dietary quality, the authors examined data from the School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study , a national study of school meal programs conducted for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition Service during the 2014-15 academic year.

The authors focused on the 508 schools eligible to offer universal free meals based on their percentage of students who qualified, based on household income, for free and reduce-priced meals. Of those 508 schools, 103 provided universal free meals.

The researchers discovered that per-student meal costs rose at small schools, or those with fewer than 500 students, after implementing a universal free meal program. Small schools offering breakfast to all kids on campus spent $4.03 per child, on average, compared with $3.85 per child at schools that did not participate in the program.

Per-pupil lunch costs remained the same at $6.30.

The authors write that in 2014-15, the first year the Community Eligibility Provision became available nationally, it appears “the economy of scale was not yet available for CEP participating small schools.”

When they analyzed data about the dietary quality of school meals, they learned it did not change after schools implemented universal free meals, despite reductions in per-meal costs for medium and large schools.

Paying for Free Lunch: The Impact of CEP Universal Free Meals on Revenues, Spending, and Student Health Michah W. Rothbart, Amy Ellen Schwartz and Emily Gutierrez. Education Finance and Policy, May 2022.

The financial impact of providing free lunches for all students differs for urban and rural schools in New York, researchers conclude. Rural schools statewide tended to lose money when they implemented universal free meal programs prior to the pandemic. Meanwhile, schools in more heavily populated regions did not.

“In fact, [the Community Eligibility Provision program] increases the size of school food program deficits in rural districts by $30 per pupil,” write the researchers, Michah W. Rothbart and Amy Ellen Schwartz of Syracuse University and Emily Gutierrez of the Center on Education Data and Policy at The Urban Institute. “Conversely, CEP helps close school food program deficits in metro and town districts.”

Rural schools are more likely to face other financial hurdles. Before expanding their free meal programs, many would need to expand the size of their cafeterias and hire additional staff.

To better understand the financial impacts of universal free meal programs, the researchers analyzed a variety of data, including school revenues and expenditures and school meal participation rates, for 698 New York school districts from 2010 to 2017.

Rothbart, Schwartz and Gutierrez learned that schools lost local revenue when they started participating in the Community Eligibility Provision program because children received meals for free. And food expenses grew as more kids chose to eat school breakfasts and lunches.

However, federal meal funding also increased for these schools.

“Overall, federal revenues more than compensate for changes in local school food revenues and expenditures, with no effect on instructional expenditures,” the researchers write. “Thus, the ‘price’ of [universal free meals] seems to be largely paid by the federal government, with a notable exception of rural districts.”

‘It’s Just So Much Waste.’ A Qualitative Investigation of Food Waste in a Universal Free School Breakfast Program Stacy A Blondin, Holly Carmichael Djang, Nesly Metayer, Stephanie Anzman-Frasca and Christina D. Economos. Public Health Nutrition, December 2014.

This small study, based on interviews and focus groups, focuses on breakfast food waste at 10 elementary schools in a large, urban school district in the U.S. One of the main takeaways: Students at these schools, all of which offer universal free breakfast, throw out a lot of the milk and fruit they receive each morning.

Some of the potential reasons: Kids often don’t have time to finish their breakfasts. Many dislike some of the foods served — oatmeal bars and plain milk, for example. Also, young children have a tough time eating oranges that have not been peeled.

The paper does not estimate the amount of waste. Rather, it offers a qualitative view of the issue — perceptions of food waste, attitudes toward it and possible explanations for why children throw away so much of their school breakfast.

A team of researchers from Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy conducted interviews and focus groups with a total of 235 people — 86 parents, 44 teachers, 85 students, 10 cafeteria managers and 10 elementary school principals. More than 70% of participating parents, teachers and cafeteria managers were Hispanic.

One teacher, when asked about food waste, “suggested that more than half of [milk] cartons offered were discarded as ‘The number of milks we’ve — I have 20, only 21 students right now. But I would say, on the average, we throw away at least 15 milks a day,’” the researchers write.

A teacher also noted that serving an expired item to one student can be problematic for a whole classroom.

“Foods in such conditions were cited as provoking participant skepticism and mass disposal,” the researchers write. “As one teacher explained: ‘One of the kids will notice, and then everyone looks, and then – they won’t eat it, they’ll throw it away. Even if it’s a day late, they won’t, they’re not eating it.’”

Study participants shared a variety of ideas for reducing food waste, including cutting fruit before serving it and saving unused foods for future consumption.

A cafeteria manager said serving breakfast in class has helped reduce waste at their school. Because students must stay in their classrooms after eating, they don’t rush through breakfast so they can go outside.

“Kids are not throwing their trays away automatically like they did [in the cafeteria], because they want[ed] to go out and play on the yard,” the cafeteria manager told researchers.

About The Author

Denise-Marie Ordway

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Should school lunches be free for all? A pandemic experiment.

• Deep Read ( 5 Min. )
• By Nick Roll Staff writer

April 7, 2021 | SPRINGFIELD TOWNSHIP, OHIO

Ever since March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, schools across the United States have been ground zero in a massive, accidental experiment in universal free meals. All public school children are for the first time experiencing equal access to food, no questions asked.

But the idea of providing universal free meals requires a certain shift in thought – and budgets – that not everyone agrees with.

Why We Wrote This

Long involved in fighting childhood hunger, public schools are providing free meals this year – regardless of family income. The unplanned experiment offers clues about what works. Third in a series about hunger in America.

“The National School Lunch Program was created to provide meals for children from low-income families, period,” says Jonathan Butcher, who researches education policy at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. While opening up eligibility during the pandemic might make sense, previous expansions – and the prospect of making the current one permanent – have resulted in programs straying from their origins and providing meals to people who don’t want or need them, he says.

By contrast, universal free meals make perfect sense to Hattie Johnson, director of nutrition services for Monroe County Community School Corporation in Bloomington, Indiana. “If we’re supposed to treat all kids the same, if public education is supposed to be free, and we know that the kids can’t make it through the school day without having something to eat, then why isn’t it a part of a free education?”

It’s 5 p.m. on a Tuesday, and Cathy McNair and a few student volunteers are ready to go. They’ve wheeled out a couple dozen boxes of pre-packaged meals – some donated and some from the school’s food services provider – to the Finneytown Secondary Campus parking lot in suburban Cincinnati.

High school and middle school students here are attending class on a hybrid model – partially in person, partially remote. But students need to eat regardless, so the questions arise: If they’re not getting their meals at school, how are they getting them? Are they getting them?

Ms. McNair, the school social worker, and her team set up shop multiple times a week to hand out free school meals to anyone who wants them. Parents pull up, drive-thru style, to maintain social distancing. 

“I love it. I absolutely love it,” says Christina, a mother of four, who asks that her last name be withheld in order to feel comfortable talking about her family’s financial situation. Without the meals, she says, “it would be a lot more stressful. A lot more of me monitoring – ‘Alright, you can have this much milk today.’”

Despite myriad programs – free and reduced-price school breakfasts, lunches, and after-school meals, as well as benefits like SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) – 11 million children in the United States lived in “food insecure” homes before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the advocacy group No Kid Hungry. Amid predictions that number could reach 18 million during the pandemic, restrictions on how poor a family had to be to qualify for free school meals were lifted – opening up the program to all.

Since March 2020, schools across the country have been ground zero in a massive, accidental experiment in universal free meals. 

The results aren’t perfect, advocates say, but it’s opened up new ground in a debate on how to make sure each American child has enough to eat every day. 

As a result of the expansion of the meal programs, advocates say, working poor people can now get the help they need, and families don’t feel singled out for receiving free meals. After more than a year under this temporary system, some are seeing a new, permanent path emerging for universal free school meals.

Others see a new entitlement creeping up in place of a targeted poverty-reduction program and want to return to the previous system if the expansion expires in September as planned. In the meantime, all public school children – in one of the world’s wealthiest nations – are for the first time experiencing equal access to food, no questions asked.

“Personally, I think it would be great if we had food, and if kids wanted food, they got food,” says Ms. McNair. At the Tuesday meal distribution, she spots a student leaving an extracurricular activity and asks if he wants a meal. He hesitates at first, but takes one. Without missing a beat, Ms. McNair asks him, “Just one? Do you have siblings at home?”

Stigma-free food or undue entitlement?

In a normal year, free or reduced-price school meals were a lifeline for students from low-income families. Schools – or the companies they contract with to provide food – could get reimbursed by the federal government for the free and reduced-price meals they offered. But there was a strict income threshold for eligibility.

For Christina and her family, who have depended on free school lunches off and on over the years, lifting the eligibility requirements also lifted a huge mental burden as she and her husband faced unemployment and underemployment amid the pandemic’s devastating economic toll. 

“There’s a stigma behind a free lunch,” says Christina, picking up her meals at the Finneytown Secondary Campus. “Some kids are embarrassed that they’re on that free lunch. And so, with everybody having it, there’s not that stigma behind it.”

Her family certainly isn’t alone.

The pre-pandemic eligibility rules inevitably meant some students weren’t getting the assistance they needed. Gerry Levy, nutrition services director for several Cincinnati-area school districts, rattles off examples: children of working poor people who made just a bit too much money to be eligible, those who can’t read English and didn’t turn in the forms, and those who were too embarrassed to ask for help. For Ms. Levy, the expansion has been “ideal.”

But the idea of providing universal free meals requires a certain shift in thought – and budgets – that not everyone agrees with. One Indianapolis-area public school contacted by the Monitor, for example, was hesitant to comment on its meal expansions. The administrator voiced concerns over how members of the community, located in a politically conservative area, would react to the fact that people who didn’t need free meals might be getting them.

“The National School Lunch Program was created to provide meals for children from low-income families, period,” says Jonathan Butcher, who researches education policy at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. While opening up eligibility during the pandemic might make sense, previous expansions – and the prospect of making the current one permanent – have resulted in programs straying from their origins and providing meals to people who don’t want or need them, he says. 

When it comes to shoring up the previous system, “let’s make a program that is going to help those in need as effectively as possible,” Mr. Butcher says. “Making school meals universal creates an entitlement – it essentially gives up on the idea that we should be concerned about accuracy.”

“All of a sudden we can afford it”

Hattie Johnson, director of nutrition services for Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC) in Bloomington, Indiana, knows something about crunching numbers.

Before the pandemic, during the 2019-20 school year, Ms. Johnson’s school system was on track to rack up nearly $100,000 in school lunch debt, accrued from students not paying for their lunches. 

When students pass through the lunch line without any cash, schools usually serve them anyway and document the money the family needs to pay back. When it’s a kid who forgot her lunch money, that’s no big deal. When it’s a family struggling to make ends meet – but ineligible for free meals – schools are stuck chasing after money from people who don’t have it. In recent years, the MCCSC has turned to a local charitable foundation and the federal government to help reconcile the negative balance.

But this past school year brought a completely unexpected test: Can the nation actually afford to offer free school lunch? Ever since March 2020, MCCSC has done just that, and its school lunch debt problem has essentially disappeared. 

“I’ve been in school meals since 1993. And when I came in ... the big push was universal feeding” – that is, free school meals for all, regardless of income, says Ms. Johnson. “For a gazillion years, [the United States Department of Agriculture] would say we cannot afford it. Then, COVID. And all of a sudden we can afford it.”

This spring, there aren’t as many free meals being served as Ms. Johnson would have expected – children have returned to classrooms, but some families are still remote, and not all are picking up meals. Others are packing lunch, out of COVID-19 concerns. But the results of this year’s experiment in universal free meals are clear – at least to her.

“If we’re supposed to treat all kids the same, if public education is supposed to be free, and we know that the kids can’t make it through the school day without having something to eat, then why isn’t it a part of a free education?”

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Top 10 Reasons to Support Free Healthy School Meals for All

April 8, 2021

In this guest blog post, Dr. Janet Poppendieck, Urban School Food Alliance Advisory Council Member, highlights 10 key reasons to support free healthy school meals for all . Professor Poppendieck is the author of Free For All: Fixing School Food in America (University of California Press, 2010).

• Reduce childhood hunger and food insecurity. An alarming increase in food insecurity among children has been reported during the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthy school meals should be available to all students, including those who may be in need but are not financially eligible under the current rules. — a common occurrence in parts of the nation where the cost of living is high. Providing free meals to all eliminates the inaccuracies in application and certification that have resulted in some eligible children being denied free or reduced-price meals, and it encourages participation.
• End s chool food stigma. When school meals are perceived as “welfare food,” or “poor kids’ meals,” some students in need decline to participate, preferring to go hungry, and those who do participate consume a meal tainted by shame. The stigma derived from the income-based classification of students quickly transfers to the food itself, leading to perceptions that it is inferior, even when the items served are the very same ones that students are purchasing from the corner store.
• Terminate “lunch shaming . ” Ironically, efforts to reduce the stigma associated with free and reduced-price meals have created a new type of shaming. As school systems have converted to electronic systems using swipe cards or finger imaging to mask the distinction between the children who are paying the school meals fees and those who are not, the problem of “low balance” or unpaid lunch bills has led to public shaming of students in efforts to collect money from parents. Some schools stamp children’s hands with a message to parents: “I need lunch money.” Some take trays away from children when they reach the cashier, giving students an inexpensive replacement meal widely known as a “stigma sandwich.”
• Eliminate lunch debt. Meanwhile, unpaid lunch bills total hundreds of thousands of dollars annually that must be written off by school food operators, reducing the resources available for food, staff, and equipment and thus the quality of the meals offered. Further, owing lunch money deters parents from participating in school activities such as parent-teacher conferences and exhibit nights.
• Remove a significant administrative burden. Distributing and collecting applications for free and reduced-price meals, certifying students for the proper school meals fee categories based on parental income, verifying a subset of applications to comply with federal requirements, and assigning and reporting each meal served to the correct reimbursement category are complex processes that absorbs the time of principals and teachers as well as school food service staff, time that could be better spent on education.
• Improve the meals. As participation increases, the unit cost of producing each meal goes down. By removing barriers to participation and eliminating unpaid meal debt,      healthy school meals for all will increase the resources available for food and labor, resulting in better, fresher, more appealing food — and thus further increasing participation. As more students participate, more parents and students will have a reason to get involved in efforts to improve menus and meal quality.
• Speed up the lines, giv e students more time to eat. Studies show that when students are pressed for time to eat, they reach for sweets and carbohydrates first, and often forgo the healthiest foods on their plates. With everyone entitled to meals, schools can experiment with innovative approaches to the lunch hour such as serving meals during club meetings and specialized activities.
• Promote student health. School meals are designed to meet nutrition standards and promote healthy eating . In a nation in which diet-related diseases are rampant, food education is widely recognized as a crucial contributor to health. A school in which all students are invited to the table can improve student health outcomes in the present through healthy meals, and in the future by integrating school food with the curriculum.
• Enhance learning and academic achievement. Students who eat do better than students who miss meals. Students who consume healthy foods do better than students who pick up a bag of chips and a soda at the corner store. Students in schools with      healthy meals for all fared better on tests than their peers in schools without universal in a carefully controlled study by the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.
• Foster social solidarity, reduce bullying, promote cohesion. Think of meals at summer camp — a time for relaxation, socialization, and joy. Once the stigma of the association with poverty is removed, school lunchrooms can become the hospitable places that they were always intended to be.

  Urge your Members of Congress to support free healthy school meals for all today.

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Hunger advocates want free school meals for all kids. it's tough sell in congress.

Bridget Huber

A third-grader punches in her student identification to pay for a meal at Gonzales Community School in Santa Fe, N.M. During the pandemic, schools were able to offer free school meals to all children regardless of need. Now advocates want to make that policy permanent. Morgan Lee/AP hide caption

A third-grader punches in her student identification to pay for a meal at Gonzales Community School in Santa Fe, N.M. During the pandemic, schools were able to offer free school meals to all children regardless of need. Now advocates want to make that policy permanent.

When the government made school meals temporarily free to virtually all public school students in 2020, the intent was to buffer children and families from the spike in hunger and economic hardship caused by the pandemic. It also inadvertently turned out to be a pilot project for something anti-hunger groups had been pushing for years: making school food free, permanently, for all public school students, regardless of income.

Once free meals were in place, albeit temporarily, many advocates thought that they would at least remain that way for the rest of the pandemic—if not longer. That didn't turn out to be the case; this spring, Republicans blocked an extension of the waivers that allowed schools to serve free meals to all, which made the prospect of legislation establishing universal school meals remote.

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This fall, schools are once again charging for lunch and breakfast, and people who run school food programs are back to the familiar scramble to get students signed up for free and reduced-price meals — and to the familiar worry that some kids will feel stigmatized for getting free meals, end up in lunch debt or go hungry.

Those arguing for universal free meals say that it would put an end to that stigma and to administrative hurdles that can prevent parents from signing their kids up.

While advocates say Republican opposition to expanding school feeding programs is daunting, they haven't given up on the idea of making school meals free for all. Instead, they're trying to keep the momentum going by backing state-level efforts that could eventually lay the groundwork for federal action.

States move to free school meals for all kids

This year, California, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Nevada will offer free meals to all public school students, regardless of their family's income. Connecticut has also funded free meals for part of this year, and Colorado voters will decide in November whether to make school meals free to all. Universal meals legislation has been introduced in a number of other states, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland and North Carolina.

A state-by-state approach isn't ideal, says Clarissa Hayes, deputy director of school and out-of-school time programs at the Food Research & Action Center, but it's still an important step — one that never would have happened if the pandemic hadn't hit.

"It really moved the needle," she says. "We are excited to see what's happening in the states, and in most cases, it is a bipartisan effort and there are a lot of partners at the table."

Biden's goal to end hunger by 2030 and his new food conference, explained

But whether action at the state level will translate into more support for federal universal school meals legislation is unclear, says Katie Wilson, the executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance. "You can roll the dice," she says.

While state initiatives could help popularize the idea of universal meals, they could also give federal lawmakers cover to argue that the question of whether to make meals universally free is best left to state legislatures, she says. That would sell kids short, Wilson says, noting that children's access to healthy food should not depend on their zip codes.

No matter how much support universal school meals have at the state level, Republican opposition in Congress is formidable, she says.

"Right now, there is just not the desire to do universal school meals at a national level from one side of the aisle," she says. "So how do you change that? We don't know. We've been trying for decades."

Federal lawmakers will likely hear from constituents upset that kids' access to school meals has been curtailed at a time when so many families continue to struggle with food insecurity, and high food and fuel prices, says Diane Pratt-Heavner, director of media relations at the School Nutrition Association.

But she says that passing universal meals legislation , of the sort that Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Ilhan Omar and other Democrats have introduced in recent years, is going to be "an uphill climb."

Another workaround to help hungry kids

Pratt-Heavner and other advocates point to an upcoming opportunity to increase kids' access to free school meals in a less sweeping, but still significant way — the child nutrition reauthorization process. Every five years, Congress is required to reauthorize school feeding programs, and it's a critical chance to strengthen them, advocates say.

Congress is overdue to reauthorize the program, but there was finally some movement in July when House Committee on Education and Labor Chairman Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat, introduced a childhood nutrition reauthorization bill that was praised by anti-hunger advocates.

Millions of children will miss healthy school meals when pandemic relief expires

The bill, if enacted as written, would alter the rules governing the Community Eligibility Provision. In its current form, the provision allows schools where at least 40% of students are "directly certified" — that is, enrolled in federal safety net programs like SNAP or TANF or are in the foster care system — to offer free meals to all students at the school, regardless of need.

In the 2021-22 school year, 33,300 schools serving 16.2 million children used the provision, according to a USDA spokesperson — that's nearly a third of the nation's 49.5 million public school students.

But advocates say that the program isn't reaching as far as it could. That's because under the current rules, schools that have between 40% and 62.5% of their students directly certified still have to pay for a portion of the meals they serve, which not all schools or districts can afford or want to do. It's only when 62.5% or more of the student body is directly certified that the federal government pays the entire amount.

The Scott bill would change reimbursement rates so that schools would only have to have 40% directly certified students to be fully reimbursed for all meals served. And it would allow schools or districts in which 25% of students are directly certified to participate in the program if they were willing to cover a portion of the cost.

Pratt-Heavner says the bill's provisions would help many more schools in high poverty communities offer meals to all students. But she says that it still wouldn't help the economically-stressed families who live in wealthier communities.

"At the end of the day, these meals are important to all students," she says. "And that's why it's important to just offer meals to all students, without an application, just like we offer them textbooks and bus service."

This story was produced by Ag Insider, a publication of the Food & Environment Reporting Network . FERN is an independent, nonprofit news organization, where Bridget Huber is a staff writer.

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Feeding Young Minds: The Importance of School Lunches

By Jane E. Brody

• June 5, 2017

Harding Senior High, a public school in St. Paul, Minn., has long been known as a 90-90-90 school: 90 percent of students are minorities, nearly 90 percent come from poor or struggling families and, until recently, 90 percent graduate (now about 80 percent) to go on to college or a career.

Impressive statistics, to be sure. But perhaps most amazing about this school is that it recognizes and acts on the critical contribution that adequate food and good nutrition make to academic success. Accordingly, it provides three balanced meals a day to all its students, some of whom might otherwise have little else to eat on school days.

For those who can’t get to school in time for early breakfast, a substitute meal is offered after first period, to be eaten during the second period. Every student can pick up dinner at the end of the school day, and those who play sports after school can take the dinner with them to practices and games.

To Jennifer Funkhauser, a French teacher at Harding and a hands-on participant in the meal program, making sure the students are well fed is paramount to their ability to succeed academically. Ms. Funkhauser and the staff at Harding are well aware of the many studies showing that children who are hungry or malnourished have a hard time learning.

After she noticed that some youngsters were uncomfortable eating with hundreds of others in a large, noisy lunchroom, Ms. Funkhauser created a more private, quieter “lunch bunch” option for them.

The attitude and atmosphere at Harding are in stark contrast to the humiliating lunchroom experiences suffered by students at some schools, where youngsters are sometimes shamed in front of their classmates and their meals confiscated and dumped in the garbage when parents have an unpaid lunch bill.

A recent article in The New York Times pointed out this appalling practice . My Jewish friends and I called it “a shanda,” which is Yiddish for a scandal, a disgrace, an embarrassment.

But current problems with school lunch go far beyond shaming innocent children. After major improvements championed by the Obama administration in the nutritional value of school meals were already underway, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives and now the Trump administration have begun to undermine them.

In 2010, spurred by the advocacy of Michelle Obama, Congress enacted the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, revamping the nation’s school lunch program to increase servings of vegetables, fruits and whole grains, provide age-appropriate calories, remove dangerous trans fats and limit levels of sodium. Schools were given incentives in the form of meal reimbursement funds to prompt them to participate.

Alas, in the fiscal-year 2015 Agriculture Appropriations bill, the House included waivers allowing schools that had a six-month net loss of revenue for any reason to opt out of providing the healthier meals outlined in the 2010 act, Dr. Jennifer Woo Baidal, a pediatrician affiliated with Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine .

Now, just days into his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, former governor of Georgia, rolled back the timetable by at least three years for reducing the high levels of salt in school lunches. The rollback will also allow schools to serve refined grains and 1-percent-fat flavored milk, instead of nonfat. Will progress on vegetables and fruits, calories and other fats be next on the chopping block?

Providing adequate amounts of nutritious food in schools is more important than many realize. “Students who eat regular, healthy meals are less likely to be tired, are more attentive in class, and retain more information,” Sean Patrick Corcoran, associate professor of economics and education policy at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, told The Atlantic .

In fact, well-designed studies have demonstrated that “students at schools that contract with a healthy school lunch vendor score higher” on statewide achievement tests, Michael L. Anderson of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues reported in April. They showed a 4-percentile improvement in test scores above those achieved in schools with less healthy meals.

“While this effect is modest in magnitude, the relatively low cost of healthy vendors when compared to in-house meal preparation makes this a very cost-effective way to raise test scores,” the researchers concluded.

In Minnesota, where 10 percent of households are considered “food insecure” and one child in six risks hunger, Wilder Research reported in 2014 that improved school nutrition is a “major component of Minnesota’s Statewide Health Improvement Program.” The Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, in St. Paul, described studies showing that simply providing free breakfast can result in better school attendance, improved behavior and concentration and better academic performance.

Clearly, an expansive food program at schools like Harding Senior High bears replication nationwide, not cutbacks.

“Nutrition can affect learning through three channels: physical development (e.g., sight), cognition (e.g., concentration, memory), and behavior (e.g., hyperactivity),” the Berkeley team wrote. For example, they explained, diets high in trans and saturated fats have a negative impact on learning and memory, reducing substances in the body that support cognitive processing and increasing the risk of neurological dysfunction.

Schools have complained that children don’t like the healthier meals and are more likely to throw the food away. However, an analysis of three large studies by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that under the improved nutrition rules, food waste actually declined in 12 Connecticut schools; children consumed more fruits and vegetables in eight elementary schools in southeast Texas; and in four elementary schools studied by the Harvard School of Public Health, children ate more of their entree and vegetable servings and more children took a serving of fruit.

A study conducted by Cornell University researchers at a New York high school in 2012 found that making healthier foods more convenient for students increased their sale by 18 percent and decreased the grams of unhealthy foods consumed by nearly 28 percent.

An earlier Cornell study found that simply moving the salad bar from a corner of the lunchroom to the center increased the sales and consumption of this healthier fare. Offering students a choice between two vegetable options and having them pay cash for unhealthy items like desserts and soft drinks, the findings suggested, may enhance consumption of healthier foods without reducing revenue or participation in school lunch programs. While the studies are not conclusive, they suggest that with a few simple steps, schools may have an impact on the foods students eat.

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Pros and Cons of Free Lunch Programs

“If a child eats hot lunch at school every day, they’re having approximately 180 meals out of the year at their educational institution.”

School meals. For many people, these two words bring apathy, if not downright discomfort. Soggy vegetables, wilted salads, and some kind of unidentifiable slosh called “gravy” come to mind.

Still, while not very pleasant, it’s not exactly a picture that you’d expect to cause heated arguments.

Actually, the kind of food schools serve is not the controversy that we’ll be discussing today. Instead, we’ll take a look at school meals in the context of their cost—that is, the pros and cons of offering free school meals to every child.

The Current State of Affairs

“The National School Lunch Program provides low-cost or free school lunches to 31 million students at more than 100,000 public and private schools per day,” explains Food Revolution Network . “Meals must meet nutritional standards based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a federally assisted meal program. It was founded in 1946 by President Harry Truman and operates in public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. The NSLP has fed millions of American schoolchildren over the decades. A similar program, the School Breakfast Program (SBP), provides breakfasts to children under the same general guidelines as the NSLP.

Currently, children who attend schools participating in the NSLP have access to free or low-cost meals, but only if they meet specific guidelines laid out by the program. The NSLP has basic requirements for students to be eligible for free or low-cost meals. These guidelines are laid out below by the Public School Review :

• “A child whose family income is at or below 130 percent of the poverty level can receive free meals
• A child whose family income is between 130 and 185 percent of the poverty level can receive reduced-cost meals (Students in this category are not charged more than 40 cents per meal)
• If a child’s family income is over 185 percent of poverty, the student will pay [full] price for meals, which are actually still cost-subsidized by the local school district
• After school snacks are provided for children using the same income guidelines; however, students attending a school where at least 50 percent of students are eligible for NSLP are all provided snacks free of charge”

While the National School Lunch Program provides an incredible number of lunches to school children, it doesn’t offer free meals to every child . The same goes for the School Breakfast Program.

And that’s where the controversy comes in.

Some advocate for free meals for all students, but others oppose this idea. The question is not likely to be settled for years to come, but both sides have good arguments to consider.

Pros of Free Meals for Every Student

“Universal free school meal policy has both a business case and a moral case, and it makes sense whether you see it from the perspective of the child, parent, teacher or taxpayers/society as a whole,” suggests The Guardian . “… giving a free, healthy, hot lunch to all children will improve the health and education outcomes of a whole generation.”

From claims of educational benefits to leveling the proverbial “playing field,” the virtues of this concept are praised high and low. Let’s briefly examine some of the positive aspects of offering free school meals to every child:

• Children can’t learn on an empty stomach. Regardless of family income, many children end up without lunch at school. Their cafeteria tab hasn’t been paid because their single dad simply forgot to pay. Their mom forgot to prepare a packed lunch to take with them. Whatever the case, readily available income isn’t always the issue for a child going hungry. And, a hungry child is a distracted child.

According to the Food Research & Action Center , “Students who eat do better than students who miss meals.…Students in schools with healthy meals for all fared better on tests than their peers in schools without universal [meals] in a carefully controlled study by the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.”

Free meals for all students would significantly reduce the likelihood of hungry children laboring through their studies, regardless of the cause of their hunger.

• Free school meals for all children would “level the playing field.” Often, there are stigmas associated with using a free meal program at school. By far, this is one of the most compelling incentives to universalize free lunches.

According to the FordFoundation, one in three New York City students eligible for a free lunch chooses to go hungry instead of enjoying their free meal. Why? Because of the stigma attached to identifying as a low-income child.

“Some kids are hesitant to participate in the programs, feeling embarrassed that they are different from their peers. There can be a stigma attached to receiving free and reduced lunch, especially in the upper grades, when peer pressure can make kids reluctant to accepting free meals,” explains New America . “In some cases, children may have to go to alternate locations in the school to receive a free meal, separating them from their peers.”

If every student had access to free meals, there would be very little basis for stigmatization or bullying based on a student’s meal ticket.

• Free meals for all help to fight childhood hunger. Regardless of the reasons, thousands of children go hungry at school. Ultimately, free school meals for all students would drastically reduce this problem.

As Civil Eats points out , “School meals have the potential to serve as a safety net for us all.…How can we shape school meals to better (re)connect us to each other, reinforce solidarities across lines of social difference, and provide much-needed support to everyone raising children today?”

Cons of Free Meals for Every Student

“While it’s easy to see the benefits that the NSLP provides, the program has also been subject to controversy and criticism over the years. The program has also struggled to keep up with the increasing demand.”

This evaluation of the National School Lunch Program from Vanco Education highlights a few issues with the program. Now, imagine these issues multiplying substantially across all government-run meal programs if free meals were offered to every student.

This is not the only argument from the opposition. Below are just a few of the objections made by those who don’t support free school breakfasts and lunches for all:

• It’s no secret that nearly anything the government is involved in ends up with mishandled finances, unnecessary costs, and inefficiency. That’s just the cost of the government doing business. It really isn’t surprising, then, that the current school meal programs are plagued with exactly these issues.

The Heritage Foundation points out that these problems already exist in the current meal programs . “According to the Office of Management and Budget, the National School Lunch Program lost nearly $800 million owing to improper payments in fiscal year 2018, while the School Breakfast Program lost $300 million. The Office of Management and Budget calls these programs ‘high-priority’ programs because of the misspending.”

Similarly, the Niskanen Center explains that the NSLP is a prime example of the inefficiency of these types of federal programs . The Niskanen Center states, “According to spending and participation figures from the OMB and USDA respectively…costs have continued to rise, despite the fact that the total number of students in the program declined.”

According to the USDA’s “ School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study ,” the average school meal program operates at a slight deficit. The study also found that the reported cost of offering school meals generally exceeds the federal reimbursements allotted for those meals. It doesn’t appear that the country, in general, can afford to provide free school meals to all students, regardless of their qualifying status.

• The quality of school food isn’t great. There’s an entire group of Americans who are downright concerned about it. Despite these concerns, budget is one factor that keeps food quality low.

“The National School Lunch Program provides low-cost or free school lunches to 31 million students at more than 100,000 public and private schools per day.…Participating schools receive approximately $1.30 to spend for each child,” notes the Food Revolution Network . “This amount must cover the food, as well as any labor, equipment, electricity, and other costs … Tight budgets make serving healthier foods challenging.”

Now, imagine providing free meals to ALL students, regardless of income status. With low budgets already causing significant issues as far as food quality goes, we can reasonably assume that the $1.30 per student would be drastically cut with an added influx of new students expecting free school meals.

• According to one PMC study, an estimated $1.2 billion worth of school food is wasted each year. Skeptics of free meals for all schoolchildren fear that waste will only continue to rise if universally free school meals are an option.

A Cambridge University Press study appears to support these concerns : “US public schools, which serve 7·4 billion meals to more than 30 million children represent a prime target for food waste reduction.…Previous research suggests that food waste in US public schools is substantial in magnitude and value.…As SBP [School Breakfast Program] participation continues to increase and universal free school meal programmes expand, total food waste in such programmes is expected to rise concomitantly.”

The Bottom Line

There are good arguments on both sides of this debate.

Children need to eat, and no child should go hungry because of circumstances ultimately out of their control. Free meals for all children would eliminate several complex issues and benefit thousands, if not millions, of children. On the other hand, the objections to the free meal strategy are valid, too. Fiscal responsibility and the quality of the meals offered, for instance, remain huge problems that aren’t likely to get better with larger output.

The bottom line is that Americans must carefully weigh the pros and cons of the issue and develop a logical and effective strategy. No system will be perfect, but with careful thought, research, and creativity, there may just be a suitable answer out there that can satisfy both camps.

We’ll just have to wait and see what that answer might be.

( Really This goes far beyond the commenting! It wrote his thoughts while reading the article amazingly)

[…] Pros and Cons of Free Lunch Programs  […]

[…] result in a financial deficit. The Office of Management and Budget corroborated these findings, reporting that the National School Lunch Program lost $800 million due to “misspending” in 2018. The […]

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How the quality of school lunch affects students’ academic performance

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, michael l. anderson , mla michael l. anderson associate professor of agricultural and resource economics - university of california, berkeley justin gallagher , and jg justin gallagher assistant professor of economics - case western reserve university elizabeth ramirez ritchie err elizabeth ramirez ritchie ph.d. graduate student - university of california-berkeley, department of agricultural and resource economics.

May 3, 2017

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The main goal of the law was to raise the minimum nutritional standards for public school lunches served as part of the National School Lunch Program. The policy discussion surrounding the new law centered on the underlying health reasons for offering more nutritious school lunches, in particular, concern over the number of children who are overweight. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in five children in the United States is obese.

Surprisingly, the debate over the new law involved very little discussion as to whether providing a more nutritious school lunch could improve student learning. A lengthy medical literature examines the link between diet and cognitive development, and diet and cognitive function. The medical literature focuses on the biological and chemical mechanisms regarding how specific nutrients and compounds are thought to affect physical development (e.g., sight), cognition (e.g., concentration, memory), and behavior (e.g., hyperactivity). Nevertheless, what is lacking in the medical literature is direct evidence on how nutrition impacts educational achievement.

We attempt to fill this gap in a new study that measures the effect of offering healthier public school lunches on end of year academic test scores for public school students in California. The study period covers five academic years (2008-2009 to 2012-2013) and includes all public schools in the state that report test scores (about 9,700 schools, mostly elementary and middle schools). Rather than focus on changes in national nutrition standards, we instead focus on school-specific differences in lunch quality over time. Specifically, we take advantage of the fact that schools can choose to contract with private companies of varying nutritional quality to prepare the school lunches. About 12 percent of California public schools contract with a private lunch company during our study period. School employees completely prepare the meals in-house for 88 percent of the schools.

To determine the quality of different private companies, nutritionists at the Nutrition Policy Institute analyzed the school lunch menus offered by each company. The nutritional quality of the menus was scored using the Healthy Eating Index (HEI). The HEI is a continuous score ranging from zero to 100 that uses a well-established food component analysis to determine how well food offerings (or diets) match the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The HEI is the Department of Agriculture’s preferred measure of diet quality, and the agency uses it to “examine relationships between diet and health-related outcomes, and to assess the quality of food assistance packages, menus, and the US food supply.” The average HEI score for the U.S. population is 63.8, while the median HEI score in our study is 59.9. In other words, the typical private company providing public school lunch in CA is a bit less healthy than the average American diet.

We measure the relationship between having a lunch prepared by a standard (below median HEI) or healthy (above median HEI) company relative to in-house preparation by school staff. Our model estimates the effect of lunch quality on student achievement using year-to-year changes between in-house preparation of school meals and outside vendors of varying menu quality, within a given school . We control for grade, school, and year factors, as well as specific student and school characteristics including race, English learner, low family income, school budget, and student-to-teacher ratios.

We find that in years when a school contracts with a healthy lunch company, students at the school score better on end-of-year academic tests. On average, student test scores are 0.03 to 0.04 standard deviations higher (about 4 percentile points). Not only that, the test score increases are about 40 percent larger for students who qualify for reduced-price or free school lunches. These students are also the ones who are most likely to eat the school lunches.

Moreover, we find no evidence that contracting with a private company to provide healthier meals changes the number of school lunches sold. This is important for two reasons. First, it reinforces our conclusion that the test score improvements we measure are being driven by differences in food quality, and not food quantity. A number of recent studies have shown that providing (potentially) hungry kids with greater access to food through the National School Lunch Program can lead to improved test scores. We are among the very few studies to focus on quality, rather than food quantity (i.e., calories). Second, some critics of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act worried that by raising the nutritional standards of school lunches that fewer children would eat the food, thereby unintentionally harming the students that the law was designed to help. Our results provide some reassurance that this is not likely to be the case.

Finally, we also examine whether healthier school lunches lead to a reduction in the number of overweight students. We follow previous literature and use whether a student’s body composition (i.e. body fat) is measured to be outside the healthy zone on the Presidential Fitness Test . We find no evidence that having a healthier school lunch reduces the number of overweight students. There are a few possible interpretations of this finding, including that a longer time period may be necessary to observe improvements in health, the measure of overweight is too imprecise, or that students are eating the same amount of calories due to National School Lunch Program calorie meal targets.

Education researchers have emphasized the need and opportunity for cost-effective education policies . While the test score improvements are modest in size, providing healthier school lunches is potentially a very cost-effective way for a school to improve student learning. Using actual meal contract bid information we estimate that it costs approximately an additional $80 per student per year to contract with one of the healthy school lunch providers relative to preparing the meals completely in-house.

While this may seem expensive at first, compare the cost-effectiveness of our estimated test score changes with other policies. A common benchmark is the Tennessee Star experiment , which found a large reduction in the class size of grades K-3 by one-third correlated with a 0.22 standard deviation test score increase. This reduction cost over $2,000 when the study was published in 1999, and would be even more today. It is (rightfully) expensive to hire more teachers, but scaling this benefit-cost ratio to achieve a bump in student learning gains equal to our estimates, we find class-size increases would be at least five times more expensive than healthier lunches.

Thus, increasing the nutritional quality of school meals appears to be a promising, cost-effective way to improve student learning. The value of providing healthier public school lunches is true even without accounting for the potential short- and long-term health benefits, such as a reduction in childhood obesity and the development of healthier lifelong eating habits. Our results cast doubt on the wisdom of the recently announced proposal by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to roll back some of the school lunch health requirements implemented as part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

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Why school lunches should be free to all

Ankeny debate underscores need to give all kids free school lunch.

Teachers noticed when some students at Southview Middle School in Ankeny were not eating lunch. When those teachers found out negative balances in lunch accounts were to blame, they started a fundraiser and donated about $1,500.

Such initiative and generosity deserve recognition. It should serve as an example to all of us. Yet charity should not be necessary when it comes to school lunch. 

The situation in Ankeny underscores the need for federal officials to reconsider how millions of children are fed each day. The best option is to provide every student attending K-12 schools with a free lunch. All of us can share in covering the cost the way we share in paying for other aspects of education. 

Considering hungry children cannot focus to learn, providing a meal is as critical to education as math class. And kids should not go without food because their parents didn’t pay the lunch lady.

Unfortunately, the Ankeny school board is considering guidelines that move in the wrong direction. In September it passed the first reading of a policy that deals with how to handle negative lunch balances.

The policy states students in kindergarten through seventh grade would receive lunch, regardless of their balance. However, students in eighth grade and above would be denied food after two meals in the red. Eventually the district will send unpaid account balances to “an outside collections agency.”

Of course, lunch should not be denied to any student, including older ones. And the board seemed to recognize the idea went over like a lead balloon with the public. Members pulled the policy from a subsequent meeting agenda, delaying a vote on the issue until this month.

But this group of unpaid, elected officials is in a tough position.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the country’s school lunch program, has required that every school district develop a negative lunch balance policy. Who is supposed to pay the meal debt owed to the district, which has grown from $5,000 to $43,000 over the past four years? 

More: Provide free lunch to all schoolchildren

Ankeny is a city of relative wealth with a median income about $20,000 higher  than the state median. Its school district may be able to cover lunch bills with donations. But it should not have to, and other districts with less affluent residents could not even hope to do so.

A free lunch for everyone is hardly a radical idea. Taxpayers already subsidize lunches for millions of students from lower-income families. In 2016, three-quarters of the 5 billion lunches served in school cafeterias were provided to students free or at a reduced price.

More than 40 percent of Iowa’s public school students qualified for subsidized meals in the 2016-17 school year, according to data from the Iowa Department of Education . In some districts, including Waterloo and Perry, nearly 70 percent of students are eligible.

How much more would it cost to feed all children? And how much would be saved by eliminating the bureaucracy, administrative expenses and school board headaches created by the current system?

Home — Essay Samples — Education — Public School — School Lunch Should Be Free And More Healthy

School Lunch Should Be Free and More Healthy

• Categories: Public School

About this sample

Words: 1078 |

Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 1078 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Works Cited

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018). Childhood Obesity Facts.
• Food Research & Action Center. (2022). National School Lunch Program. Retrieved from https://www.frac.org/programs/national-school-lunch-program
• Gatto, N. M., Ventura, E. E., Cook, L. T., & Gyllenhammer, L. E. (2012). Davis SPAN Program: A Nutrition Intervention Program for Children with Special Needs. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 112(2), 231–237.
• Government Accountability Office. (2011). National School Lunch Program: Improving Nutrition and Resource Management Could Further Enhance Program’s Effectiveness.
• Honigman, J. (2019). Students protest after Pennsylvania school district threatens to put kids in foster care over unpaid lunch debt.
• Hsin, A., & Muth, M. K. (2008). Effect of Excess Adiposity on Arterial Elasticity in Children. Annals of Pediatric Endocrinology & Metabolism, 13(1), 23–28.
• Neumark-Sztainer, D., Story, M., Hannan, P. J., Perry, C. L., & Irving, L. M. (2004). Weight-Related Concerns and Behaviors Among Overweight and Nonoverweight Adolescents: Implications for Preventing Weight-Related Disorders. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 158(2), 185–193.
• School Nutrition Association. (2022). 2022 Position Paper: School Meal Programs. Retrieved from https://schoolnutrition.org/advocacy/policy-priorities/position-papers/
• The State of Obesity. (2022). Adult Obesity in the United States.
• United States Department of Agriculture. (2022). National School Lunch Program: Participation and Lunches Served. Retrieved from https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/national-school-lunch-program-nslp

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