Editorial: Provide free lunch to all schoolchildren
For two months, Josette Duran of New Mexico packed two lunches for her teenage son, Dylan. When he first asked for the extra meal at the beginning of the school year, she figured he was hungrier than usual. Eventually he told her he was giving the food to a friend whose mother couldn’t pay the lunch bill.
Duran continued to pack the second lunch. When the other boy’s mother found out and tried to pay Duran back, she refused the money. When a volleyball team raised $400 to reimburse her, she used it to pay past-due accounts for kids at her son’s school.
“Now nobody in that school owes any money, and everybody can eat,” she said in an Oct. 14 Facebook video.
Her generosity was contagious.
Jerry Fenton, more than 1,000 miles away in Burlington, heard the story. The Iowan donated $700 to pay overdue lunch bills for students at Grimes Elementary School in Burlington, which he had attended as a child.
Such acts of generosity deserve recognition and should inspire the rest of us. But they should not be necessary when it comes to school lunch.
This country is long overdue in reconsidering how it feeds millions of schoolchildren each day. Every child in a K-12 school should receive a free lunch. All of us should share in covering the expense the same way we fund many other costs of education, from heating school buildings to paying teachers.
Isn’t lunch as standard a part of the school day as math class?
Providing lunch to everyone is hardly a radical idea. Taxpayers already subsidize low-cost and free meals for more than 30 million students each day. In Iowa, about 42 percent of public school students qualified for reduced-price or free meals in the 2015-16 school year, according to data from the Iowa Department of Education. In Burlington and Council Bluffs, more than 64 percent of students qualified, and more than 75 percent in Columbus and Perry.
How much more would it cost us to feed them all? And how much of the expense could be offset by eliminating the bureaucracy and administrative expenses in the current system?
It was 1946 when the National School Lunch Act was established. Though updated over the years, the structure remains basically the same. The federal government gives cash subsidies and food to schools. The schools agree to meet federal requirements.
But the system inevitably turns a lunch lady into a collection agent. It embarrasses families who owe money or must admit to being poor so their children can get free meals. It embarrasses children who receive an “alternative” meal when their account is in arrears. Schools are awash in paperwork.
And generous people feel compelled to donate money so children can eat a meal at school. There must be a better way.
Des Moines is doing lunch right
Des Moines Public Schools offers meals at no cost to all students in 40 schools and four early learning centers. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) program is funded largely by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It covers 100 percent of the cost of breakfast and lunch for everyone attending schools identified as having a high number of children in poverty. These schools are no longer awash in the bureaucracy of collecting applications from parents to determine income or trying to collect money from parents. And it’s good for kids, too. “Students can focus on their studies, and not on where their next meal will come from,” said Superintendent Tom Ahart.