The Democratic-led Nevada State Assembly has passed a bill to provide student breakfasts and lunches in schools throughout the state, ensuring that school-aged children will remain fed, regardless of their income levels, through at least the next two school years.
Nevada has enough money left over from pandemic funding from the federal government to continue providing free meals to students in the 2023-24 school year. The newly passed proposal, Assembly Bill 319, allocates an additional $43 million in funding toward extending free breakfasts and lunches in the 2024-25 academic year.
“We owe it to our students to provide them with a quality education and research shows that means ensuring they do not go hungry in the classroom,” said Assembly Majority Floor Leader Sandra Jauregui, who introduced the proposal. “Ensuring that no child is left hungry in the classroom should not be a partisan issue.”
The bill passed last Thursday by a vote of 28 members of the Assembly in favor and 14 opposed — a two-thirds “constitutional majority” that means, if the State Senate votes at the same rate, it cannot be vetoed by Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo.
The state Senate has yet to vote on the measure. The partisan makeup in that chamber is such that it stands a high likelihood of passing but would need at least one Republican lawmaker to join every single Democrat in order to make its passage veto-proof.
Since the federal pandemic-related program to fund school meals across the entirety of the nation expired last year, only a small handful of states have passed legislation to extend it, within their jurisdictions, for additional years — only two states, California and Maine, have made free school meals programs permanent fixtures. Voters in a third state, Colorado, approved a ballot measure that allows districts to opt-in to such a program, but doesn’t require every district to provide a free breakfast and/or lunch to students.
The idea of a permanent federal program to provide free meals to students throughout the U.S. is widely popular. A Data for Progress poll in 2021 found that nearly three-in-four voters (74 percent) backed the idea. Last summer, an Urban Institute poll made similar findings, with 76 percent of adults with children and 67 percent of adults without children in public schools supporting a permanent free school meals plan at the federal level.
Early last month, progressive lawmakers in Congress submitted a proposal that would create a permanent federal program. The Universal School Meals Program Act, introduced jointly by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), would provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack in schools without regard for family income.
“It is an international embarrassment that today, in the richest country in the history of the world, we are seeing record numbers of children and youth struggling with hunger on a daily basis,” Sanders said in a statement regarding the proposal. “We cannot continue to prop up a grossly unjust economy in which the very rich get richer while millions of working families struggle to afford the most basic necessities of life, from paying for rent and medications to feeding their children.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We are presently looking for 98 new monthly donors before midnight tonight.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy