WASHINGTON — Amid the persistent Child hunger and food insecurity In the United States, lawmakers and advocates stressed the importance of school meal programs on Wednesday during a hearing at the U.S. Senate Agriculture Subcommittee.
Hunger has a stern impact emotional and physical well-being of children and can lead to negative consequences at school, studies have shownAccording to data from last year, 47.4 million people lived in households affected by food shortages. United States Department of Agriculture.
Federally funded initiatives such as the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program provide free or reduced-price meals to students across the country.
Supporters of these programs say they play a critical role in reducing child hunger and are calling on the panel to expand them.
“School lunch should always be free and definitely judgment-free,” said Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Food and Nutrition, Specialty Crops, Organic Products, and Research.
“Honestly, this shouldn’t be a topic of conversation — it would be like asking kids to pay for the school bus every morning or to pay for their own textbooks at school,” Fetterman said.
Fetterman and his colleague, Pennsylvania Democratic Senator Bob Casey presented two bills in June, aiming to expand children’s access to free or reduced-price meals. Some of the initiatives also call for changes to the Community Eligibility Provision, which allows schools and school districts in low-income areas to offer free meals to all students.
Fetterman also sponsored the Universal School Meal Program Act, an initiative introduced by Independent Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders last May, which would mean “providing every student with a free breakfast, lunch and dinner — without having to prove they are poor enough to deserve assistance in the form of three meals a day,” Sanders said. abstract bill. U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, introduced accompanying bill.
Subcommittee member Mike Braun of Indiana said he had introduced American Food for American Schools Act last July with Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown as part of an effort “to better prioritize and support the use of American-made foods in school meal programs.”
This bipartisan bill would augment school meal requirements to include American-made products.
Model States
Crystal FitzSimons, interim president of the Center for Food Research and Action, pointed out that eight states have implemented policies that offer school meals to all students, regardless of household income. These states are California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Vermont.
A national nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing poverty-caused hunger in the United States through research, advocacy, and policy solutions.
“While these eight states show us what is possible, there are critical steps the subcommittee and Congress should take to expand the reach and impact of school meals across the country,” FitzSimons said.
FitzSimons said one piece of the puzzle is that Congress can “ensure that all children across the country are not hungry and ready to learn while in school by allowing all schools to offer meals to all their students at no cost,” and the Universal School Meals Program Act “creates that pathway.”
Meg Bruening, professor and chair of nutritional sciences at Pennsylvania State University, said that “U.S. school meal programs provide a vital safety net for nearly 30 million children each year,” which is 60% of children in the country.
Bruening said these school meal programs are closely tied to Dietary Guidelines for Americans“ensuring children have access to a variety of healthy foods at school, where they spend most of their waking and eating time.”
The guidelines developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services are as follows: updated every five years.
Summer EBT
Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock stressed that childhood hunger increases during the summer months when children do not have access to regular meals at school.
Thirty-seven states, the District of Columbia and many territories and tribal nations joined this year in a recent initiative known as Summer EBT to provide food for children during the long summer months.
The USDA initiative, also known as Sun Bucks, provides low-income families with school-age children with a $120 grocery benefit per child throughout the summer.
But 13 states, including Georgiachose not to participate in the program in 2024. USDA said states have until Jan. 1 to submit a notice of intent if they plan to participate in the program next year.
Warnock said he hopes state leaders change their position in summer EBT.
“Unfortunately, my home state of Georgia has not opted into the Sun Bucks program, with some officials saying it does not translate into better nutritional outcomes for students and that existing programs are ‘effective,’” he said.
“I’ve heard our state government say, ‘We don’t need this,’” he added. “I’m still trying to figure out who ‘we’ are — who are you talking to when you say, ‘We don’t need this?’”
A spokesman for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said the governor has concerns about the program’s nutritional standards and costs.
