This commentary is by Sarah McMillan, who lives in Cambridge, New York, and has taught social studies at Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester for 15 years. For the past four years, she has also been the school’s food program coordinator.
As we have all discovered, one of the key things the pandemic has revealed is the depth of inequity that exists in our society. One place this has become evident is in our schools’ lunchrooms.
As our nation shut down in an attempt to “flatten the curve,” Washington moved to use the vast infrastructure of the public schools system to keep millions of students fed by making school meals free to all students.
As we are hopefully coming out of the pandemic, there is a discussion on whether we should continue universal meals or if it is time to resume business as usual and go back to the free and reduced lunch program that existed prior to the pandemic, or some looser version of it.
Of course, in theory, everyone supports feeding students but the cost, which in the case of Vermont is estimated to be up to $40 million, quickly chills the discussion. When this issue was brought up during the last session, state Sen. Jane Kitchel framed it in the following way: “When it comes time, do you want to spend that $20 million for better books or enrichment in your schools or buying meals for higher-income kids?”
As an educator and food program coordinator, I find this framing deeply flawed in two key ways.
First, it doesn’t accurately reflect the root cause of the problem. Society at large has so tightly correlated success and money, and (falsely) asserts that poverty is an individual character flaw, that a return to the status quo in our lunchrooms would only reimpose a key barrier to equity in our schools.
Even with all the steps schools employ to ensure that a student’s income status is not disclosed, there are plenty of cultural and social cues that create stress for students that drive many to not eat. This culture of shame associated with being a “free kid” — which students begin to develop in their consciousness and then have to navigate in their social worlds — drives them to do everything they can to hide their economic status.
By letting this play out in our lunchrooms, instead of being a place where all students can thrive, we end up perpetuating this false correlation and undermining the very purpose of public education.
Secondly, Kitchel’s framing presents a false choice. We know enough about how students learn to know that if a student is hungry and doesn’t have consistent access to proper nutrients, you can provide all the books or enrichment opportunities you can find but they won’t be able to access it.
As one colleague said to me recently: “Knowing that all our students have access to nutritious, whole, healthy food allows teachers to do their jobs more effectively. Teaching is a very human job. It is hard to prioritize reading and writing skills if students are hungry.”
The role of school cafeterias during the pandemic has shown us that we need to stop thinking about food programs as tangential to the education of our students and start funding them as an essential component of the larger educational institution, on the same footing with academic programs.
While I can sympathize with state legislators that finding the money is hard, it is not impossible and I would urge them to reexamine the funding mechanism. Currently, we put the funding mechanism on the backs of individual students as they navigate the lunchroom, rather than the state’s ability to allocate resources behind the scenes, where it belongs. As one student recently stated, “Being able to eat is a basic need. It should not be an added stressor in one’s life.”
The pandemic has helped to put into clearer focus the fault lines in our systems, and while addressing the many facets of poverty and the personal shame that we allow to be associated with it is a complex problem that requires a complex set of solutions, universal meals is one way to help move Vermont forward.
