Why isn’t school lunch free?

It's the Weeds. I'm John Golan Hill. Have you ever noticed that we talk about debt a lot? Like, a lot, a lot. Think about it. From the debt ceiling to your vidmo payments, and please do not get me started on student loans, we owe a lot of money. And when we talk about debt, typically we're talking about adults, which makes sense. But in some places, kids as young as elementary school are going into debt, lunch debt. The 2023 school nutrition trend survey says that the total lunch debt is over $19 million, which is likely an undercount, because that's just from the schools that have self-reported. It's a problem that we've solved for a little bit. During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, kids in public school got free lunch. But that program lasts. And for a lot of students, when school starts back up again, their debt will start back up again too. A lot of you experienced this firsthand. A couple weeks ago, I went to social media and asked if anyone would be willing to share their school lunch debt story. And so many of you came forward. Like Antonia. I absolutely loved school. I was a huge reader. School was a very much, in general, a happy place. But all of those memories aren't fond. Specifically, her memories around lunch. She's an educator now, but she remembers what it was like being in lunch debt back when she was in elementary school. I do have memories of like the lunch card. There was like this card, and everyone had a lunch card with their ID number and you. You go through and the lunch lady, of course, is at the end scanning all the cards that you go through and you pick each item up along the way. And then you get to the end. And at the end is when you find out, I guess, depending on how much money you have if you're going to be able to walk away with the tray. And I do remember a few incidences where like the tray was taken away. And I was given peanut butter and jelly and like skim milk. And I did not drink milk at home. That was also like an added layer of like not having something to drink at lunch time. And in those moments when like you were told, oh, you owe money and they like take the food away that you've selected as a child. And you're given something that you have no interest in. It kind of fills the don't word I would use as dehumanizing because all your peers are behind you and they're seeing your food being taken away. And then they're walking away with what they chose. And it's something that like obviously I wish that children were still not experiencing, but unfortunately that's something that's still happening across the country. If you could go back in time and talk to that version of you that was you know, in elementary school, getting that peepy and J. What would you say to her? That's such an emotional question. I would say it doesn't reflect anything on like her and who she is and what she's capable of. And that adult should be making better decisions for children and how we feed them in schools. I think we don't treat children as full humans in this country and they often just bear the front of the hatred and the arguments between adults political differences. And it's just truly unfortunate. And I often think about how like the US is one of the few countries that hasn't signed on to the like the UN rights of the child. And like ever since learning that nothing that this country has done to children has surprised me. I think since children in this country are mandated to attend schooling of some sort. Mill should be included. I think it's a great equalizer. Children can't focus if they're hungry. They're not going to give their best effort. They're not going to be able to accept the experiences that school can offer them. And the money is there to fund school mills. So I think like fully funding schools and to begin with in public schools immediately it should be included. A child should never have to have a mill taken away from them at school because they don't have the money to pay for it. Thank you so much to Antonia and all of those who share their stories with us. My name is Anna North and I'm a senior correspondent at Box.com. Anna covers family life here at Box. She's also super talented and has written three novels. She's reported on school lunch debt and has been watching the policy conversation evolve over time. I asked her to lay out the scope of school lunch debt in America. Nationwide millions of kids actually rely on free or reduced price lunch through school. It's some 30 million children total around the country. Who are these kids and these families who receive free and reduced lunch? Who qualifies? What do we know about the socio economic info? So the federal government sets specific eligibility criteria for free and reduced price lunch. To get a free lunch you have to be at or below 130% of the federal poverty line. For this year that's $39,000 a year for a family of four. And then for reduced price lunch you have to be at or below 185% of the federal poverty line. A lot of people say it's not really enough that those eligibility criteria are too strict because especially in high cost of living areas. If you are making $39,000 and you're trying to feed your family of four you are having a lot of trouble. You really could use some help from schools. Yeah, that sounds like such a low number for a family that size. It's really low. I think a lot of folks would argue that it's inadequate. Again, especially in places where food is more expensive like in cities or coastal areas where the cost of living is just higher. How much does a typical lunch cost? Like I remember when I was an elementary school taking my dollar 50 up to the lunch lady. What's the price looking like now? It's set by states and sometimes by districts within the states. But it's like around 250. I think the average for the most recent year we had data was like $2.42 but 250 is a good benchmark. What do children who get their food from school do during the summer when they're not in class? Yeah, there's a summer meal program to where kids can either eat at designated schools or in some cases they can pick up food or get food from other locations. So they ideally shouldn't be going in the summer either. You mentioned that the average price of school lunch is $2.42. Do we know how those prices are even set? Like how are they determining that this is how much a child's lunch costs? Schools get a certain amount of subsidy from the federal government to pay for lunches. You know, they also have often a certain amount in their budget for it. And then basically whatever else they need to charge, they will charge to families who are paying. IE who aren't getting free or reduced price lunch. I know that for maybe some adults who either don't have kids or maybe have a little more money. $2.50 to feed your kid a day does not sound like a lot. But this can add up quickly. How is this a financial burden for families? Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I think it's interesting. Because if you think about like, you know, walking into a restaurant in New York City, for example, like $2.50 for a lunch sound, it could sound cheap. But it does that up really fast. So for example, $2.50 per day per lunch. That's $50 a month. And then if you have multiple kids, that's obviously adding up. Then you have to think about like the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour. So that's not really paying for that many lunches. Again, especially if you have multiple people in your family, you know, you look at those income thresholds, $39,000 a year to get a free lunch. That means if you were making $40,000 a year for a family of four, you wouldn't qualify anymore. And $40 a year, you got a lot of expenses that are coming out of that. So again, like $2.50 could seem like a bargain, but that's actually more than a lot of folks going to afford to pay. So we did see a shift in this school lunch policy a few years ago back in March 2020 when COVID hit. So Congress passed a bunch of federal relief at the time, including the stimulus checks, which you know, I'm sure a lot of us miss. But they also funded free school lunch and that feels like a huge deal when you think about, you know, school lunch debt. Can you walk us through how that program worked? It was a huge deal. I think the pandemic really created this space where things were so unusual and in some ways catastrophic that really unusual solutions were tried. I mean, feeding kids maybe shouldn't seem unusual. But as a policy matter, this was kind of unprecedented. There was a huge concern about feeding kids during the pandemic, right? I remember that one reason that then Mayor Bill Tablasio was really reluctant to close the schools in New York City was because so many kids relied on the schools for their food. And that's true around the country. School districts were all trying to figure out like, well, how are we going to keep kids fed when the physical school buildings are closed? There was also concern about like, there's a lot of sort of overhead and a lot of person-to-person contact involved with qualifying for free and reduced price lunch. So kids might be showing a card, kids might be showing eligibility, kids who are paying for their lunch or handing over money, right? Like all this stuff, like, I think those are all things we were trying to reduce at the beginning of the pandemic, right? We didn't want people having that kind of close contact with each other and like touching the same stuff. So these are all reasons why officials decided, you know what, we're just not going to charge anybody. We're just going to make this free, essentially the federal government created a waiver program where school districts would just get money to feed everybody for free, no questions asked, no more eligibility or requirements, nothing. It was great. It worked amazing. I have to say the idea of children being in debt for lunch is one that kind of boggles my mind a little bit, especially, I don't know, I am a public school kid. I went to public school in Kansas City, Missouri and I remember when I was in elementary school paying for lunch and there were so many students at my school who qualified for free lunch, we eventually all got it. It just kind of feels like, oh yeah, like, yeah, that's part of the, you know, that's part of, you know, what the tech colors go to paying for paying for food. Yes, totally. On one level, it's weird to think about young school children having to pay for lunch at school at all, like they're supposed to be, they have to go to school, right? They got to learn, it sort of seems intuitively like they should be fed and lunch debt was becoming a huge scandal even before the pandemic. You probably would remember there were a lot of viral stories about kids who, you know, were considered like in debt to their school because for whatever reason, maybe they didn't, they either didn't qualify for free or reduced lunch or often kids families who did qualify often wouldn't do the application. There's a lot of reasons for that one is just the applications are complicated. They might not always be in languages that the family can understand. And another is that there's embarrassment. It's, you know, in America, there's an embarrassment often associated with being on these federal programs and with taking what's perceived as charity. So even if that's not necessarily always the way it should be perceived. So for all these reasons, there were kids who like really couldn't afford food who still weren't necessarily getting food for free and they would go into debt. And there was, you know, something that got called lunch shaming were kids, you know, would sometimes be forced to go hungry or they would get an alternate meal that might be really embarrassing and obvious. Justin and Hailey said they already had a full lunch tray, but they were told to give it back. In return, they were handed new trays with a plain cheese sandwich. As her grandson was denied the lunch he wanted because of a $9 unpaid balance. He was bullied. He was bullied by the school officials. He had his lunch removed from his tray at the age of nine. And on Friday, Anaya says the cafeteria felt like her least favorite place. When I went to do my number, they told me that I'm here to give my food back to Miss Jenny. And it would really mark these kids out as different and stigmatized. And it was a big problem in a lot of places. You did start to see sort of people taking matters into their own hands and like paying off the lunch debt of different districts or different students. So there were sort of these grassroots efforts to try to like get kids fed and to end some of the shaming long before the pandemic started. But it was only in 2020 when really because of the accident of this horrible public health crisis suddenly the whole system decided to set itself up so that kids could all be fed. Do we know what impact that free lunch had or is it difficult to kind of tell because you know everyone was on lockdown. We don't know what's going on at home. But do we know the impact that those free lunches had on students? We do have some measures of the impact. So we know that food insecurity in at-risk households with kids actually went down by about seven percentage points between the start of the pandemic and the summer of 2021. Which is a big deal because remember this was the pandemic. This was a time when a lot of people were out of work. They weren't necessarily getting paid. And it was also a time when it was hard to get food like I think we you know we might forget now that going to the grocery store was you know dangerous and scary and grocery store workers were getting sick. And so the fact that kids had this source of food for themselves when it might be hard for their families to be shopping. That was a big deal too. And then there are some intangibles also that you know folks at schools will talk to you about one just the paperwork. There's an enormous amount of overhead involved in like the whole free and reduced lunch system. And it's not something that these already overstretched underfunded schools have time for or staff for. And then also something that folks told me is just like if you work at a school, especially if you're like your job is like feeding kids at a school you want to be feeding the kids. You don't want to be like charging the money, tallying up their debt, calling their parents to get money out of them. That feels bad when you're in a role where what you want to do is care for children. So there was a big emotional impact I think for kids and families and then also for the folks who work at the school and work with them every day. So it sounds like we kind of low key solved schools lunch debt, but that's not the case anymore what happened. Yeah, at this point in the history of COVID-19 what we're seeing is a lot of these pandemic era programs start to lapse. And at the beginning of the 2022 2023 school year, we saw the free school lunch waivers program lapse. So that extra money that the schools were getting to give everybody free lunch, no questions asked that started to end. And districts were kind of left scrambling some of them tried to you know keep it up for a while on their own through their own funds. Others were like this is not going to work when I have to start charging again. It's been kind of a mess. So that's the lunch situation now, but what's the origin story for all that square pizza? We'll get into that next. It's the weeds. I'm Jacqueline Hill. Anna when was the first time the federal government stepped in and said hey lunch is on us. When did we start to see lunch in schools? So school in America kind of starts in the late 19th century. There started to be compulsory education laws kids have to go to school. There started to be bands on child labor kids can't go to work. So kids started being in school buildings for more hours per day. And the schools kind of just had a bigger role in their lives. There started to be health screenings in schools reformers were worried about malnutrition. There started to be some privately funded school meal programs in some cities. Then the depression hits in the 1930s those kind of go away. But the federal government actually stepped in with emergency programs. Those are really popular too. So eventually that gave rise to the National School Lunch Act which passed in 1946. In thousands of schools across the country millions of school children participate in the National School Lunch Program. Lunches are designed to be nutritious attractive and well balanced. Can you tell us a little bit about the 1946 National School Lunch Act what exactly did it do? So the National School Lunch Act basically created a three tiered system for school lunch in America. Kids in poverty would get a free lunch. Kids whose families were above the poverty line but still struggling economically would get a reduced price lunch and everyone else would pay full price. And that's pretty much how it works now right? There have been a few changes that we can get into the Child Nutrition Act was passed in 1966. That increased some of the subsidies that the federal government would pay schools and districts for meals. It also established the school breakfast program so that kids could get free breakfast at schools too in some cases. Establishing breakfast was a really big deal in part because it's important for kids to be able to have lunch at school. But if they didn't have breakfast in the morning then they're also not going to be able to learn and again food is kind of an important human need. Schools really have become these places that for better or for worse meet a lot of kids needs in American society and like breakfast is a really basic need. An interesting note is that schools haven't been the only programs to provide free breakfast. The Black Panthers in 1969 actually started a program to provide free breakfast to a lot of kids. The Black Panther Party operating without government funds has established a nationwide free breakfast for children program. It far exceeds the federal nutrition guidelines. That went through the 70s and at one point actually fed more kids than the state of California. So there have been you know a lot of different efforts to a recognize that kids need food and be actually feed them. But the Child Nutrition Act did really expand the amount that schools in the government were willing to do. And that maintains to this day where we see around 14, 15 million kids getting getting school breakfast every day. The next major piece of legislation that impacted school lunch was the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act in 2010. For background, if anybody, any of our listeners went to public school, have a kid in public school, you probably kind of remember that school lunch in America started to get a pretty bad reputation. There is an idea that it's a lot less healthy than school lunch in other countries that it's generally really low quality, you know, that it's just gross. There really I think became a sort of middle class flight away from school lunches where a lot of families would say we're never going to let our kids have school lunch. If we can afford it, we're going to pack them a lunch. So in 2010, the Obama administration really wanted to work on this as part of a general thing. A lot of it was spearheaded by First Lady Michelle Obama to improve kids nutrition and their exercise. Because while it might seem counterintuitive, child hunger and child obesity are really just two sides of the same coin. Both rob our children of the energy, the strength and the stamina they need to succeed in school and in life. And so the Healthy Hungry Free Kids Act mandated more fruits and vegetables in school lunches, more whole grains, less salt, really made an effort to make school lunches kind of more wholesome across the board. And over time, it did make a big difference where a lot of, you know, food service professionals, folks that work in school and just today will tell you, like it's not the school lunch. You remember, it does have a lot more fruits and veggies. It is a lot more wholesome. There's research showing that school lunch today is actually the most nutritious male kids get in a day. So it was a really big change to like what kids actually get served. And then there was one other really big change also that I should highlight, which is that the Healthy Hungry Free Kids Act created the community eligibility provision for school lunches. So ordinarily, individual kids and families will qualify for free or reduce price lunch, right? You say like, well, our family, you know, is below the poverty line. So we will apply for a free lunch. However, under community eligibility, entire school or entire district could say, actually a certain percentage of our students are in poverty, a certain percentage of our students would qualify for free lunch, no matter what. So can we just have free lunch for our entire school or our entire district and they can be granted that by the federal government. A bunch of schools across the country have been able to take advantage of that in 2022, 2023. It was more than 40,000 schools in more than 6,000 school districts around the country and almost 20 million kids attended community eligibility schools. So that doesn't mean each of those kids necessarily got free lunch every day, but they could. You know, I know here in New York City, what it looks like is it just looks like we have free lunch in New York. I didn't actually know and I have a child in public school and I didn't know until I started reporting this story, that New York City was a community eligibility district. I just knew lunch was free. It's so interesting. Can you talk a little bit about the backlash that that 2010 act faced a little bit? Because it sounds like, oh, this is great. Lunch is healthier. But you know, people weren't necessarily all that on board when it first passed, right? Yeah, it's funny because on the one hand, you think about like, it's about kids and food. So why should this be controversial? On the other hand, like, it's about kids. It's about food. Of course, it's controversial. So there was a lot of backlash. It ranged from just kids didn't necessarily like the new holy pizza to Republican lawmakers who would say, you know, how come the government suddenly telling my school what they can serve? No, the government had always been involved in what school served to a degree. For example, schools used to serve a lot of farm surplus foods, which is a little bit part maybe of why school and just got a bad rap in the first place that there was just like a lot of like extra cheese lying around that schools would be serving. So it's only like the government was suddenly getting involved, but there was a sense of government overreach, this sense of like a nanny state. And also, I mean, you'll remember the way Republicans were about Michelle Obama. And I think that was really part of this too. Remember, there was a lot of backlash about her entire program around healthy kids and healthy food. And this whole sense that she was overstepping several school districts are dropping out of the government subsidized lunch program after just one year because they say students are rejecting the healthier fair. So, you know, again, you might not expect a controversy around this, but there was a controversy. There was pushback. And actually, some of the standards in the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act were rolled back by the Trump administration. So we've seen potentially some backsliding in, you know, how wholesome school inches are. But generally, when you talk to folks, I think they still say this this 2010 legislation had a big impact and continues to. Yeah, can you can you talk about that fight and the politics more because like you said, on one hand, it feels like a no brainer like, Oh, feeding kids, that seems so simple. But on the other hand, it contains two things that people love to fight about, which is children and food. What's this political fight looking like? Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting. There's just there's just so much history here. I think there is sort of a growing coalescence on both sides around certain programs that benefit kids. And I think like feeding them feels like an obvious way to benefit them. On the other hand, think about it. We're in a time right now when a lot of people are kind of opposed to like public school. You know, there's a flight from public schools. There's libraries getting shut down. There's this huge, especially on the right mistrust of public schools and in some ways almost everything they do. So it's not a surprise that there is and that there has been opposition and mistrust around what public school speed kids and maybe even around the idea of public school speed and kids. There's also always an America been this tension between folks that want to kind of provide basic needs for everyone and a real suspicion around programs that provide basic needs for everyone and like who's deserving of having their basic needs provided for we've had these conversations. For example, like around child care in the past, a lot of things that are real needs for a lot of families like there's been these enormous political fights about so I think there's no accident that there's been these political fights about school lunch. And I don't think perhaps unfortunately I don't think we're going to see an end to those fights anytime soon. Okay, another quick break and we'll get into the future of school lunches and whether the political will exist to make them free. Stay with us. Okay, Anna, we know that the solution to this problem is free lunch for all, but what are the chances that something like that makes its way through Congress? So there was a bill introduced in 2019 by Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar that would basically make school lunch free across the board. It didn't do much at the time. It is unlikely to pass through Congress in its current state. It would cost money, which is not a popular thing in Congress right now. And again, for all the reasons we just talked about universal free school lunch might seem controversial politically, even though maybe you might think it wouldn't. So are we going to get this bill through anytime soon? I would say no. I really do think of the pandemic as you know, especially the beginning days of COVID-19. It was a real experimentation when it came to policy. Like just trying stuff that, you know, we got the child tax credit. There were the stimulus checks, you know, this free lunch and it feels like so much of it is falling by the wayside. Yeah, I mean, do you remember in 2020 that sense of like, well, now it's clear that business as usual doesn't work. Like we know all our systems are broken. You know, if anything good comes from this, it's going to be that we're going to have to reinvent all these systems from the ground up. Like there was this sense of like, oh my god, we've hit a kind of rock bottom. We're going to have to build up from the bottom. I wouldn't say it's been a completely failed promise. I think we've seen a lot of awareness raised around a lot of things, including lunch debt, including the need for kids to eat, right. The importance of childcare, all kinds of things. I think we've seen this increasing attention to, but you know, in terms of these reforms that seemed kind of revolutionary at the time. Yeah, we've seen a lot of those fall away. We're, it feels like we're falling off like cliff after cliff, right? Like we fell off the child tax credit cliff. We fell off the school lunch cliff, you know, we're coming up on a child care funding cliff in September where there was additional pandemic funding for child care programs. They're going to lose that funding. So there is this sense of backsliding. But I think it also doesn't necessarily have to be this way because we've seen what some of these programs can do. And now it's sort of a matter of like, well, can they be implemented again? So after the federal waiver program ended, how many states decided to continue to offer free school lunches? There's a growing movement, even though we're not getting the federal waivers anymore. There's a growing movement for states to provide their own kind of universal free school lunch. And it's getting bigger and bigger. So when I first recorded the story in March, it was two states. Now it looks like it's California, Colorado, Minnesota, Maine, New Mexico, Vermont. So one, two, three, four, five, six states. And other states are discussing it too. There's other discussions going on at the local, the city level. So it is something I think that people are paying more and more attention to. I think one of the things that we touched on very briefly before is, you know, the effect that a proper meal and nutrition can have on children. I distinctly remember before you know standardized test days, teachers telling us, make sure you get a good breakfast, get a very, very good breakfast. Can you talk a little bit more about what the research tells us about access to food and how children perform in school? I mean, I just want to say again, like food is a human need, even if it didn't help kids in school at all, it would still be important for them to get food. But there are all these other benefits. So research has shown that serving free school meals to kids can in some cases reduce suspension. So it can improve behavior. It can be linked to higher attendance and it can be linked to better test scores. So like in New York City, for example, I believe when lunch became free across the board, there were improvements in math and in reading scores. So it makes sense, you know, if you are hungry, you can't concentrate. If you've had a good meal and nutritious meal, then you've had that knee and mat. You can move on to things that require you to use your brain. So it is, it is something where there's a lot of research on the benefits. Something else we've talked about and I think a lot of listeners will be familiar with is the lunch shaming, you know, getting a lesser lunch or those sorts of things. But there can also be a stigma of free lunch itself. Can you talk about that a little bit? How does that impact kids? I think this is this is something that's really important to talk about a little bit that historically there has been stigma for families and for kids around getting a free lunch. So, you know, something that folks told me when I was reporting out this story is like, no matter how hard you try to make sure that kids don't feel different. Like if there's some kids that are getting free lunch and some kids that are not, the kids that are getting free lunch are going to know it and they're going to feel like they're marked out in some way and there can be stigma attached to that other kids can make fun of them. Or they can just feel it within themselves like I'm having to get this thing that other kids don't get it can manifest as some kids are bringing their lunch from home and other kids might be getting free lunch, but they have to go to the cafeteria to get it and they might be embarrassed so they don't go to the cafeteria and they just go hungry. And you can also see this really on the flip side where when you provide universal free lunch, so no questions ask. Then the stigma kind of goes away because we know that it's available to anybody. So they've even found that in schools with universal free lunch, kids kind of feel safer at school and they have a perception of less bullying and I think that might be because you know there's no longer this way that kids are comparing each other. So it's another it's another reason that just like taking the income out of the equation and no longer forcing parents to prove like we're in financial need can be really important because it's not necessarily the case that kids want to go to school every day and think about how their families in financial need. Yeah and that's heartbreaking like you just it feels like something kids shouldn't even have to think about you know. Yeah and I think what's interesting is that for a couple years there they really didn't have to think about it and now in some cases they're being forced to think about it again it's this really tough transition. Like these are kids we're talking about and you know they're hungry kids who need to eat. Do you see this remaining a political issue do you ever think that school lunch policy will ever move beyond the politics. I think it's hard I think for the reasons that we've talked about there are ways in which public school is so politicized and the reason which food is so politicized and that makes it hard. At the same time I do think we've seen more bipartisan movement around children recently and children's needs so I'm thinking about some Republican versions of the child tax credit. Also thinking just about things like the pump act which had to do with the ability of nursing parents to pump breast milk for their infants. That was something that was sponsored by Tammy Duckworth a Democrat but she also got bipartisan co-sponsorship on that and it recently passed I believe last year. So I do think that sort of maybe around the margins of these issues there has been more cooperation across the aisle and more of a sense that keeping kids healthy and fed is something people can agree on so I do think there's reason for hope. That's all for us today. We're off next week for Labor Day but when we're back we'll be looking at extreme heat and how it impacts the way we work and we want to hear from you. If your schedule has changed or if you've had to make any other work accommodations for the heat drop us a line at weeds at Vox.com. That's weeds at Vox.com. Thank you to Anna North, Antonia and everyone else who reached out and shared their story with us this week. We really appreciate it. Our producers Sophie LaLonde, Cristianayala engineered this episode, Serena Solan fact-checked it, our editorial director is A.M. Hall and I'm your host, John Flynn Hill. The weeds is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. you