This commentary is by Karyl Kent, president of the School Nutrition Association of Vermont and is the director of school nutrition at the Lamoille North Supervisory Union.
Last fall, I was hearing from a lot of educators in my school district. My colleagues across the state were hearing from their educators, too. They were afraid. Not about their students or themselves contracting Covid-19, although that was of course a concern as well.
An emergency federal waiver granting free school meals for all kids during the pandemic was about to expire, and it wasn’t clear whether it would be extended.
The USDA did ultimately take action to allow universal school meals to continue through this school year. And our teachers reported seeing a weight lift from their students’ shoulders. Many of them wouldn’t have to face rifling through the kitchen cabinet at home to try to pull together something to bring in for lunch.
One teacher told me a few of her kids laughed out loud, saying the meal extension was great news, since they hadn’t brought anything in for lunch and were just going to go without.
Back in March when the pandemic hit, school nutrition teams across Vermont didn’t hesitate. We knew that closed schools meant children would be more likely to go hungry. We delivered meals in buses. We arranged curbside pickups. I am very proud to say that Vermont was the only state that increased the total number of lunches served in April 2020 from April 2019. It was a monumental effort, and our school food service professionals and all the other school staff who have stepped up to support school meal delivery have had little to no time off ever since then. But, we’re happy to do it because these are our neighbors, our kids.
More people in Vermont are facing hunger than at any time in at least the last 20 years. Before the pandemic, one in 10 people were struggling to put food on the table. Now, one in three people in our state have faced hunger during the pandemic.
One of the hardest lessons of the Great Recession was that, years after the fundamentals of our economy started to improve, American households were continuing to rely on food assistance programs because their own household finances took much longer to catch up. It took us 12 years in Vermont to return to prerecession rates of hunger, just a couple of years before the pandemic hit.
We’ve learned many new hard lessons in this crisis. One silver lining has been that universal school meals have made our classrooms better. The stigma around “needing” school breakfast or lunch is gone. Our kids are more attentive and better behaved. There are no more morning trips to the nurse, no more falling asleep at the desk, no more inability to focus on the task at hand because a student hasn’t had enough to eat. The kids whose families under normal circumstances are just shy of qualifying for free meals don’t have to face going hungry. Research has proven that students who eat meals at school have better attendance records, see improved learning in math and English, graduate at higher rates, and even go on to earn more as adults.
Learning is the student’s responsibility. Making sure they have what they need to learn is ours. We have the opportunity to step up for our kids by making universal school meals permanent.
The Senate is considering a bill that would make universal school meals a reality — with local purchasing incentives and support for Farm to School programs that help ensure Vermont kids are getting high-quality, locally sourced ingredients from our agriculture industry. Similar legislation has already been introduced in the House as well. We know that many legislators understand that this is more important now than ever; children need equitable meal programs in their schools.
Here’s my ask for you. Reach out to your legislators and let them know you want to see universal school meals made permanent in Vermont. Let them know that we can’t go back to the old model that left too many kids hungry during the school day. As we move forward from this pandemic, we can build better systems that truly serve all our students.
Let’s lead the nation by being the first state to say that every student, every day, at every public school in Vermont, deserves access to school meals regardless of their family’s ability to pay. We can’t afford not to.
