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Legislation Update: Expanding Free Meals
After a near save for Philadelphia’s universal feeding program, Pennsylvania’s Congressional delegation has gone crazy introducing legislation that would expand the city’s paperless enrollment initiative to the rest of the nation.
Five Pennsylvania Congressmen introduced bills in the House and the Senate yesterday. H.R. 2803 and its companion bill, the Paperless Enrollment Act for School Meals of 2009 would amend the National School Lunch Act to give schools an alternative to processing applications for free and reduced-price lunches. Congressman Joe Sestak has also introduced a bill in the House, the School Meal Enhancement Act of 2009, that would make Philly’s paperless free meal program available to schools in other low-income areas.
Currently, school districts use paper applications to determine the number of students eligible for subsidized meals. The federal reimbursements they receive for each kind of meal — free, reduced-price or paid — are based on the number of each type sold. But processing all those applications is costly, and families don’t always fill them out. That means many low-income students are left out of the program, and cafeteria directors don’t get all the reimbursements they could potentially receive. Under the proposed legislation, schools would be able to serve free meals to all students for a period of five years and receive reimbursements based on socioeconomic data, rather than student applications. Reimbursement would be based on the total number of meals served multiplied by the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals.
H.R. 2803 and its companion bill in the Senate are very similar to Sestak’s bill, but there are a few differences. Sestak’s bill also includes a “participation threshold” for schools; the legislation would only allow districts to go paperless if at least 75 percent of students qualify for free or reduced meals, or if 65 percent of students qualify for free meals. The Paperless Enrollment Act would allow schools to bypass applications as long as they can pay for whatever reimbursements don’t cover (remember, they would have to serve free meals to all students, so they would give up revenue from paid lunches). A more minor difference is that Sestak’s legislation requires the secretary of agriculture to issue guidelines that establish an alternate, paperless method for determining student eligibility for subsidized meals. The Paperless Enrollment Act amends the National School Lunch Act directly, making paperless enrollment another option in that existing legislation.
Hunger advocates love universal feeding because it opens access to nutrition programs. Programs like the one in Philadelphia allow every child to receive a free lunch, even those whose parents forget to fill out forms and applications. But these bills are also important because they lighten the burden on some cafeterias, freeing up staff and money. In districts with high numbers of low-income students, very few students pay for meals to begin with. Making all meals free increases participation substantially, and in many cases the accompanying increase in reimbursements more than offsets the revenue lost from eliminating paid meals. On top of that, the cafeteria no longer wastes time and money processing applications.
The National School Lunch Program has so many regulations that cafeteria directors spend more time processing numbers and filing papers than they do feeding children nutritious meals. Universal feeding is one step to creating a program that focuses on lunch, not lunch money.
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