House lawmakers are quietly rolling back school lunch laws passed in 2010. These laws guarantee free lunches and after-school meals for children in high poverty areas.
It survived budget cuts in January, but it could still be cut. The bill provides lunches for kids at schools where at least 40% of the student body lives in poverty. They changed the bill to only allow school lunches for schools where 60% of the kids live in poverty. The bill has been praised by lawmakers for getting rid of lunch applications and eliminating the stigmatized “free lunch line” in school cafeterias.
Zoe Neuberger of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities had this to say about it. She thinks that the law should include families in high-poverty neighborhoods that may not necessarily be at the poverty line income wise:
“…high-poverty neighborhoods, which can be violent, stressful, and environmentally hazardous, can impair children’s cognitive development, school performance, mental health, and long-term physical health — even if the family itself is not low-income.”
The new standard could take away free lunches for 3.4 million students in 7,022 schools. Another 11,000 schools that were going to qualify for this no longer will.
Students at these schools will have to go back to applying for free lunches and waiting in the free lunch line.
The House Education and Workforce Committee has this list on their website about the Improving Child Nutrition and Education Act. This is what the new bill does:
- Requires regular review of federal nutrition standards to ensure they are based on sound science, reflect the input of school leaders, and meet the needs of all students.
- Enhances the verification process in order to increase accountability and transparency, and rein in fraud and abuse.
- Improves community eligibility by targeting assistance to those most in need while continuing to provide all eligible students access to healthy meals.
- Provides states more flexibility to serve nutritious meals during the summer, especially to children living in rural and low-income areas.
- Strengthens the integrity and efficiency of the WIC program by supporting a faster transition to electronic benefit transfer (EBT).
- Supports nutrition education across programs and helps bring families into schools to engage in the healthy development of their children.
Featured image by Ishikawa Ken via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
