A long time ago, when my children were little, I found out our babysitter, a low-income woman with a child of her own, had been taking them to the local park, where they all got a free lunch from the summer lunch program.
I felt badly about that, because I knew we didn’t meet the income guidelines for the program, so I went over and apologized to the park supervisor, who told me something very wise that I hadn’t expected to hear.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I could set up a system to verify everyone’s income, but then I wouldn’t have the money to buy food. So we just feed whoever shows up.”
Today might be a good time to revisit that wisdom.
Do we as a society want to spend money on food for our children, or on bureaucracy to make sure that only those children whose parents meet income guidelines can get a healthy, nutritious school lunch?
It’s a timely question and one that the Kansas Appleseed Foundation for Law and Justice explores in a new report titled: “One Year after the End of Universal School Meals: Kansas Schools and Families Feel the Burden of Meal Debt.”
The sad part of this is that we’ve already shown we can feed all our kids without breaking the national bank. During the COVID-19 pandemic, from March of 2020 through June of 2022, all students were eligible to receive free lunches.
Since that program ended, it’s been all downhill.
The Appleseed report compares school lunch debt before and after the pandemic — bear in mind there was none during it.
“Prior to the pandemic, Kansas school meal debt totaled $4.45 million. Since then, school meal debt has increased nearly 6 times to about $23.5 million,” the report says. “When school meal debt exists, children are the first to suffer the consequences as they face missing out on meals while still being expected to behave and perform at the same level as their peers.”
We can generally assume that most of the families that aren’t paying school lunch debt are struggling with the post-pandemic economy. Rents are up, food prices are up. In some cases, wages have risen for low-end jobs, but even that can be a mixed blessing.
The threshold for getting a free school lunch now stands at $39,000 in family income for a family of four. Those who make up to $55,500 — still well below the state’s median income, which the Census Bureau has estimated at $64,521 — are eligible for reduced prices on school lunches. At $55,501, it’s “No soup for you.”
Appleseed found that more than 40% of Kansas school districts have policies in place that seek to collect unpaid meal debt by one of three means: turning them over to collection agencies, taking the parents to court, or taking the money out of any tax refunds the family might be owed.
All those methods require staff time to administer and paperwork to be filed; some require lawyers to be consulted. And they add to whatever stresses the family is feeling that has them not paying school lunch charges in the first place.
It’s also largely ineffective, according to the Appleseed report.
