Free school meals for all children can improve kids’ health

SEATTLE, WA – MARCH 18: Christy Cusick hands out free school lunches to kids and their parents at Olympic Hills Elementary School on March 18, 2020 in Seattle, Washington. As a result of all schools in Washington state being closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak until at least April 27th, Seattle Public Schools is providing carry-out meals to students during lunch hours. (Photo by Karen Ducey/Getty Images)

(THE CONVERSATION) Recognizing that millions of U.S. children are at risk of hunger, Maine and California have approved funding to offer free school meals to all students within their state. Meanwhile, a bill proposed in Congress aims to make free school meals a permanent fixture in all states.

The Universal School Meals Program Act would provide free healthy meals and snacks to all children in public and nonprofit private schools regardless of income.

Currently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed school districts to provide meals free of charge to families during the pandemic. Previously set to expire in September, the policy has been extended through the 2021-2022 school year. This marks the first time in the 75-year history of the National School Lunch Program that all U.S. public school children are getting equal access to school meals, with no questions asked.

As a registered dietitian nutritionist and researcher who specializes in child food insecurity, I frequently see how access and availability to nutritious foods can shape kids’ health.

When children return to schools in the fall, the ongoing policy waivers provide an opportunity to examine how universal free school meals impact nutrition in school meal programs and health inequities among children.

Better health

Good nutrition plays a crucial role in strong academic outcomes. School meals have been shown to reduce childhood food insecurity and childhood overweight and obesity while improving overall diet quality.

School meals are often more nutritious than meals eaten elsewhere or even home-packed lunches. Studies have shown that access to school meals can improve attendance, academic performance and behavior.

Less stigma

Many children, especially those from low-income and minority families, eat up to half their daily calories at school. For these families, the cost of school meals, usually between US$2.48 and $2.74 depending on grade level, can add up quickly over a week, month or school year.

Children with outstanding meal debts could be shamed, refused a meal or provided a lower-cost alternative meal – such as a cheese sandwich, fruit and milk rather than the standard meal served to other students.

Needed relief

School meal programs are run like a business and depend heavily on federal reimbursements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When families can’t or don’t pay for meals served, schools may need to use their own funds to cover the losses. The Department of Agriculture prohibits using federal funds to pay off unpaid meal debt. The Universal School Meals Program Act would eliminate around $10.9 million of existing unpaid school meal debt reported by 75% of U.S. school districts.

In addition to school meal debt, during the first full year of the pandemic, schools served fewer meals, resulting in further losses in revenue. The meals served were more costly due to packaging and personal protective equipment for staff. As a result, more than 50% of school meal programs reported a financial loss in 2019-2020. An even greater number of programs report expecting a loss for the 2020-2021 school year.

Return on investment

A national study found that schools participating in universal free meal programs reduced their per-meal costs while maintaining nutritional quality of meals served. School meals can stimulate local economies because they can drive purchases from local farmers and ranchers and create jobs in school nutrition, food production, sales and distribution.

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For school districts, switching to a universal model of meals for all children – regardless of income – is likely to reduce administrative burdens. Schools would no longer have to waste time on applications and meeting reporting requirements like they have to do under the current reimbursement model. They could focus on healthy meals and nutrition education instead.

I believe the return on investment from universal school lunches would benefit our country’s economic recovery from the pandemic as well as the health and well-being of our country’s children.

Schools in Ohio Affected by Shortages in Food Supply Chain

As schools have opened back up for in-person learning, districts are struggling to order dining supplies and food for their students. That’s got school administrators bracing for what could be a challenging school year.

Nearly every school district in Ohio has been affected by the supply chain shortages.

A shortage of workers and raw packing materials, combined with environmental issues like droughts out west, have impacted the food distribution chain all the way down to local schools.

Olivia Stone, the Student Nutrition Services Director at Centerville City Schools, said it’s been challenging to order even staple foods, like chicken, bread and milk.

“It has been unbelievably difficult to source several food items. And it's not that the manufacturers don't have the product,” Stone said. “They don't have the labor to either run their lines or make the products.”

Schools are also serving more meals than they did before the pandemic. In a typical year, schools nationwide get a reimbursement through the U.S. Department of Agriculture National School Lunch Program Seamless Summer Option to serve free meals to children in the summer.

At the beginning of the pandemic, however, the USDA extended the program for the rest of the school year to ensure government food standards were met and to keep consistently providing nutritious foods to students, according to a USDA press release.

The program waiver — which is now extended to June 2022 — means that all school meals are free to children whose school participates in the program. In Ohio, a significant portion of schools do participate in the program, according to Brian Davis, the Assistant Director of the Office of Child Nutrition at the Ohio Department of Education.

COVID-19 safety precautions have created some challenges too. To prevent the spreading of the virus, schools are opting to serve individually wrapped items, which is becoming harder to order through food distributors.

As a result, the USDA has authorized schools for emergency purchasing in extenuating circumstances to be able to find a replacement such as going to Costco or Sam's Club, which some schools have already done, according to Davis.

“Everybody at the same time is asking the food producers for the exact same narrow range of items,” Davis said. “It's kind of like a bottleneck problem where everybody is trying to get a specific small thing through a very strained supply channel.”

Stone said feeding more children presents challenges with a shortage of supplies and a cafeteria staff that serves twice as many children than it did a year prior when the district served around 3,000 meals. It now serves nearly 6,000 daily meals, according to Stone.

“We put these menus out and we just cross our fingers. Can we get what the kids are expecting today? And that's the challenge.” Stone said.

She said parents shouldn’t be concerned, menus might change depending on what is available, but that their children will never come home hungry.

Food reporter Alejandro Figueroa is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms.

Ofsted head: schools’ focus on food parcels may have hit learning

Schools that prioritised sending food parcels to their poorest pupils during lockdown in England may not have been able to focus on providing an education to all their students, the head of Ofsted has claimed.

Amanda Spielman said it was “admirable” for staff to focus on children who were in greatest need when the pandemic first hit, but this may have had consequences for the calibre of learning a school was able to provide for all children.

She added: “In a lot of schools it felt as though their attention went very rapidly to the most disadvantaged children, into making food parcels, going out visiting.

“They put a great deal of attention into the children with greatest difficulties which is admirable, but in some cases that probably got prioritised – certainly last summer, the summer of 2020 – which may have meant that they did not have the capacity left to make sure there was some kind of education offer for all children.”

Her comments, given at an Institute for Government event about remote education during the pandemic, were in response to questions about the obvious advantage private schools had when it came to online teaching.

Spielman began her answer by pointing to the disparity in resources between state and private schools.

“The average private school has three times as much money, so far more staff, far more technology to mobilise to switch to teaching remotely,” she said. “So I don’t think we should lose sight of that entirely. But that does not explain the disparities that we saw in the state sector.”

Her comments drew immediate criticism from unions who described them as ill-judged, arguing that school staff had gone to incredible lengths to protect and care for their pupils in “the most unimaginably challenging of times”.

Zane Powles, an assistant headteacher at a Grimsby primary school, was one of many school staff who were hailed as heroes across the country for their role in helping to support and feed the poorest children. He walked five miles every day delivering 78 packed lunches to children entitled to free school meals.

Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers said: “From the very start of the crisis, staff looked after the most vulnerable pupils as the country went into lockdown; they effectively reimagined the very concept of ‘school’ as they worked to implement a remote learning offer.

“There is no doubt that this vital work helped to shield large numbers of children from the worst effects of the pandemic.”

In contrast, he said, the solutions offered by central government almost always arrived long after schools had worked things out for themselves. “Schools learned much more quickly than policymakers about what worked and what pupils needed.”

Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, added: “Schools have worked very hard throughout the pandemic to juggle many demands which have often been unfamiliar and required entirely new approaches and processes to be put in place. Our experience is that they have done extremely well in balancing these demands and doing the best they can for all their students at all times.”

Spielman was also asked about extending the school day and shortening school holidays to increase learning time as pupils try to catch up after Covid. “Enlarging the school day can certainly make sense provided it’s not just a bit of extra time that somebody else pastes on. That it’s properly integrated into the curriculum, that it genuinely helps children do better in each of their classes and provides the time for the enrichment.”