Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) introduced legislation last Friday that would create a permanent universal school meals program to provide children with free breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack, thus eliminating school lunch debt once and for all.
The Universal School Meals Program Act of 2021 would expand and make permanent a program recently extended by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to provide universal free lunches through the 2021-2022 school year. It would provide food for all children, regardless of their family income levels, free of charge.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) and Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wisconsin) joined Omar and Sanders in introducing the bill, which has nine co-sponsors in the Senate and 26 cosponsors in the House. It also has the support of over 360 education, youth and food-related organizations, says a Sanders press release.
“In the richest country in the world, it is an outrage that millions of children struggle with hunger every day,” said Sanders in a statement. “Every child deserves a quality education free of hunger. What we’ve seen during this pandemic is that a universal approach to school meals works. We cannot go backwards. I am proud to introduce this legislation alongside my colleagues to ensure no student goes hungry again.”
The USDA program was established to help all children receive breakfasts and lunches through the pandemic, but the current extension is intended only to ease the transition back to in-person schooling.
Before the pandemic, free or reduced meals were largely limited to children whose family incomes were below 185 percent of the federal poverty line. Those families also had to fill out complicated paperwork to qualify. Still, tens of millions of kids benefit from free and reduced lunch programs, and many would go hungry without them.
“Without a permanent solution to provide free meals to all students, schools will eventually have to revert to the complicated myriad of paperwork and programs that leave out or discourage too many children from accessing meals throughout the day,” read the press release on the bill.
Sanders and the Democrats want to eliminate some of the hurdles for free meals for children by making it permanent and universal. They introduced the bill with the goal of “ensuring all students have access to nutritious meals without overwhelming barriers such as stigma, burdensome paperwork,” or threats to parents to have their children taken away, the press release reads.
Indeed, some schools have shamed and threatened families and children with school lunch debt — “a gobsmackingly ghoulish phrase that shouldn’t exist,” as Natalie Shure wrote for The New Republic. Schools have marked children with stamps drawing attention to their lunch debt, sicced debt collections agencies on families that owe lunch money, and, as in the case of one Pennsylvania school, threatened to send kids to foster care if they owe more than $10 in lunch debt.
New York City schools have in the past tried implementing a free lunch program and the results were positive: A report examining the impacts of the program on the city’s middle schools found that it increased test scores, presumably helping kids to retain their education better. And schools that have implemented universal free meals, under a USDA program called Community Eligibility Provision, end up saving money in the long run without sacrificing the nutritional quality of the food.
A permanent universal free meals program could also help stimulate local economies. The bill would direct schools to get at least 25 percent of their food from local sources, which the bill’s authors argue could provide an “enormous” investment in rural communities.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.