A Colchester boy raised $1,000 through a GoFundMe campaign over the holidays to help classmates pay off school lunch debt. That story grabbed headlines – and even kudos from Gov. Phil Scott. But advocates and some lawmakers say a new policy – not charity – needs to fix the underlying problem.
A tripartisan group of senators has pitched a first-in-the-nation plan to offer universal school meals. The bill, S.223, would mandate that every Vermont public school provide every student free breakfast and lunch at no charge to families. An early estimate pegs the cost to the state’s education fund at about $4 million a year, according to Sen. Debbie Ingram, D-Chittenden, who is sponsoring the legislation.
“What’s happening now is that there is a hodgepodge of which schools provide one meal, or both meals, and how they pay for those meals,” Ingram said, adding that the mandate would bring consistency, equity, and transparency to school meal programs.
Nineteen thousand children in Vermont live in food-insecure households, according to a 2019 research report from the Urban Institute. And one-in-four students eligible for free meals at school aren’t participating in the program.
Vermont would be the first in the nation to enact such a mandate, according to Hunger Free Vermont, which is championing the universal meals effort. Seventy-seven schools in the Green Mountain State current provide universal meals using a mix of state and federal funds to more than 16,400 students, the group said.
Meanwhile, proposed changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – better known as food stamps, and known as 3SquaresVT in Vermont – will likely make it harder for schools to draw down federal funds to offset the cost of their meal programs.
Because food stamp eligible households are automatically eligible for free meals in Vermont, restricting eligibility to SNAP is expected to make it more difficult for schools to meet the participation thresholds to meet the requirements of certain federal grants. The state’s Agency of Education estimates that as many as 44% of the 56 Vermont schools currently offering universal free meals through the federal Community Eligibility Program will lose eligibility if Trump administration proposals are enacted.
For Anore Horton, the executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, changes at the federal level make state action all the more urgent.
“We should make sure that we are protecting Vermont students and families from hunger,” she said.
The proposal has the support of the Vermont-NEA, the state’s largest teachers union.
“When students are hungry, they simply cannot concentrate on class activities or lessons,” Don Tinney, the union’s president, said at a Tuesday press conference.
But many education officials are likely to bristle at another so-called unfunded mandate. The proposed legislation would ask schools to pay for the cost of their meal programs, minus whatever the federal government would reimburse.
Ingram acknowledged the bill, as written, would put some upward pressure on property taxes. But she said that the estimated cost, in the context of the state’s $1.7 billion education fund, was “incredibly reasonable.”
Jeff Francis, the executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association, said that while “good nutrition for students is very important and a significant interest of educators” a number of programs and initiatives were competing for resources in an era of declining enrollment and rising property taxes.
“Education leaders at the local level are aware of the contradiction between legislative concerns about the cost of public education and the addition of new requirements (in general) each year that add to the cost,” he said.
Steven Marinelli, the food service director for the Milton School District, said the district periodically gets offers by community members to pay off student lunch debt. But it doesn’t help much.
“It’s like touching the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
Marinelli would like to see his district adopt some sort of universal program, and he noted it had been “nibbling away” at the effort, recently beginning to offer free breakfast to all students in grades preK-5. But he said he was skeptical of the legislative effort underway.
“I’m not in favor of mandated requirements. There are creative ways that communities can do this,” he said.