This has been an especially challenging year for Rosalba Ortega’s family. 

It’s been a cold, soggy winter in Bakersfield, and Ortega said her two granddaughters, ages 4 and 7, don’t have warm coats for their walk to school. Rent and food prices have been climbing, and as a farmworker, she’s struggled to find work in the fields. Last month’s delays to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — known in California as CalFresh — hit her grandkids at a time when her family is already struggling to put food on the table.

“There’s not much food for them,” said Ortega, in Spanish. “We have to look for low prices to buy for them. Sometimes the shelters give us food and that helps us a lot.”

Ortega said her family never had to rely on shelters and churches for food in the past, but this year has been different.

She isn’t alone. Disruptions to SNAP amid the government shutdown last month came at a time when California families say they are increasingly struggling to meet basic needs, including putting food on the table. 

Three in 10 Californians — and half of lower-income residents — say they or someone in their household has reduced meals or cut back on food to save money,  conducted in October by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

Experts say that hunger and economic distress can affect students’ academic performance and determine whether they decide to attend — or finish — college.

“What’s happening out of school can have a huge impact on their ability to learn while they’re in school,” said Natalie Wheatfall-Lum, director of TK-12 policy for EdTrust-West, a nonprofit that advocates for justice in education.

Research shows children struggle to pay attention at school when SNAP benefits run out mid-month, and families turn to ultra-processed foods, according to Martin Caraher, a food policy expert at City University London who has worked with the World Health Organization.

“You see it in behavior and performance at school,” Caraher said.

Federal cuts reduce food aid 

, passed by Congress in July, made cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, called Medi-Cal in California. California’s low-income students and their families will likely see federally funded food support and health care shrink or vanish under the law.

This is coming at the same time that the Trump administration says it wants to  to “break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” a move that conservatives have long advocated since the creation of the Cabinet-level department in 1979.

Wheatfall-Lum said that the federal government has been making cuts and laying off staff at programs aimed at those who are already hardest hit by hunger and economic distress, such as migrant students, ,  and .

In its upcoming budget cycle, California should address the needs of families — both in and outside of education, she said. 

“What the state can do is make sure not to back away from programming in place to support these same students,” Wheatfall-Lum said.

EdTrust-West is advocating for the state to continue its commitment to a school funding formula that offers extra support to schools to help low-income and vulnerable students. Continuing to fund the community schools model is especially important, she said, because it is more responsive to families’ needs.

Families with young children hit hard

The number of struggling California parents with young children is especially alarming, researchers say. Nearly 3 in 4 families in California with children under age 6 report struggling with one or more basic needs, such as utilities, housing, food, health care and child care, according to the  survey conducted in July.

The project, conducted by Stanford University, has been surveying parents and caregivers with young children since November 2022. During that time, more than half of families surveyed said they struggled with basic needs, but over the last year, struggles with health care, food and utilities reached 73% — one of the highest levels since the survey began.

“It’s pretty stark data,” said Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. “Our research shows consistently that economic hardship translates subsequently into parent stress and distress, which . So if you want to know how kids are doing, these are not great trends.”

Fisher noted that supports rolled out during the pandemic, such as the expanded Child Tax Credit, increased SNAP and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) benefits, and stimulus checks, resulted in fewer parents of young children experiencing material hardship and emotional distress. As those benefits expired, that trend reversed, he said.

Researchers at Stanford asked caregivers to explain the biggest current challenges for their family in their own words. They shared those anonymized answers with EdSource.

“We’re working hard, but it’s not enough anymore,” wrote one caregiver in San Joaquin County. “We need our leaders to understand that even full-time workers can’t afford rent, health care, and food in this state. Wages haven’t kept up.”

One caregiver in San Bernardino County said they are worried about how the cuts from Trump’s budget will affect their Medi-Cal and CalFresh benefits.

“They might get cut because the [Big Beautiful Bill] passed,” the caregiver wrote.

College students struggle with basic needs

College students are also struggling — and unlike K-12 students who receive breakfast and lunch at school, they don’t have guaranteed meals.

Typically, students come into Long Beach State’s Basic Needs center because of a specific crisis, such as losing their job, said the center’s director, Danielle Muñoz-Channel. But now, students tend to come in just because they’re getting squeezed all around by rent, utilities and food prices.

“They can’t pinpoint any one factor,” she said. “We ask what changed, and they say, ‘Nothing, I just can’t afford it anymore.’”

Muñoz-Channel said she’s monitoring whether federal cuts to CalFresh and Medi-Cal benefits, such as tightened work requirements, could affect students and the future workforce. She said students need to have their basic needs met so that they can focus on school — otherwise they risk not graduating on time or not finishing their degree at all.

“I’m worried about how it will affect our most needy students who use college to break generational cycles of poverty,” she said.

Two-thirds of Ohioans support a universal free school breakfast and lunch program for all public school children, according to a Republican research firm.

“This is extremely rare in a time where voters are really reluctant to support further spending, either at the state or federal level,” Alexi Donovan, vice president of Tarrance Group Polling, said Monday during the monthly meeting.

This month’s meeting heard testimony on the importance of universal school meals and Tarrance Group Polling surveyed 600 Ohio voters about this topic in May.

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“It is clear from the research and the data over the years, universal school meals help students thrive, physically, mentally, socially and educationally,” said John Stanford, director of Children’s Defense Fund–Ohio.

In Ohio, 1 in 6 children, or about 413,000 kids, live in a household that experiences hunger. Despite that, more than 1 in 3 children who live in a food insecure household do not qualify for school meals, according to a from Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio.

“We believe that in a country as wealthy as we are, we should not have hungry children,” said Lisa Quigley, director of .

Exposing students to various fruits and vegetables through school meals helps them get a taste for “food that’s far more nutritious than what a lot of them are bringing to school,” she said.

“What we’re finding in the schools that are doing universal school meals, the food is getting better,” Quigley said.

National security

Children’s hunger is a national security issue, said Cynthia Rees, Ohio’s director for the Council for a Strong America.

The that found 77% of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible for military service without a waiver. The most prevalent disqualification rate was for being overweight at 11%, above drug and alcohol abuse (8%) and medical/physical health (7%).

“It is critical to recognize that overweight and obesity can often be manifestations of malnutrition, food insecurity or the lack of access to affordable healthy foods often result in consuming cheaper and more accessible food, which often lack nutritional value,” Rees said.

The food insecurity rate for Ohio children is 15%, with some counties having rates up to 24%, Rees said.

“Increasing children’s access to fresh and nutritious food now, including through free school meals for all students, could help America recover from the present challenges and bolster national security in the future,” she said. “The military has a long standing interest in the health and nutrition of our nation’s youth.”

Universal school meals would eliminate the stigma of categorizing students who receive free and reduced meals and those that don’t, Rees said.

“Instead, all students can just have a meal together,” she said. “When we make school meals accessible to all, we remove that stigma.”

Ohio legislation

Last year’s budget bill allowed any student who qualified for free or reduced school breakfast or lunch got those meals for free during the 2023-24 school year.

Currently in Ohio, children are eligible for free or reduced school meals if their household income is up to 185% of the federal poverty line, which is $57,720 for a family of four, according to the .

State Reps. Darnell Brewer, D-Cleveland, and Ismail Mohamed, D-Columbus, introduced a bill earlier this year that would require public schools to provide a meal to any student that asks.

would also ban a district from throwing away a meal after it was served “because of a student’s inability to pay for the meal or because money is owed for previously provided meals.” The has only had sponsor testimony so far in the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

The issue is not new, but the numbers are trending in the wrong direction: A shows 19.2% of children lived in food-insecure households in 2023, the second consecutive yearly increase following a 15-year low , when just 10.2% of children lived in food-insecure households. The spikes came as pandemic-era policies expired, like the Enhanced Child Tax Credit in 2021 and emergency allotments for SNAP in 2023. 

This is unacceptable, especially when the U.S. has the tools to end child hunger.

Free school meals have been around for more than 50 years. Both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged that well-nourished kids achieve better academically, and everyone benefits from a stronger economy and greater national security, when children are fed.

For the first time in a long time, the role of school meals in eliminating hunger made it into the national conversation when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz while accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president.

While it may be unusual for hunger in the classroom to make a prominent appearance in a presidential campaign, it’s not unusual for an educator — which Walz was for many years — to insist that food is the most important school supply. For many kids, school meals are the most nutritious of the day, helping to fuel their success in the classroom and beyond.

Good work is happening across the country to reach more students with school meals. At least eight states, including Minnesota, have made school meals universal, meaning they’re available to all students regardless of family income. Others, like Texas, are getting rid of categories of need — making meals programs run more efficiently, reducing the stigma of receiving free or low-cost meals and feeding .

For decades, barely half of students who got free or reduced-price lunch also ate breakfast at school. Now, many schools have embraced breakfast-after-the-bell options, like letting kids eat in class during first period or offering grab-and-go options. This overcomes the challenge of getting to the cafeteria before school starts, and the stigma in doing so.

And in summer, when schools are closed, new flexibility in rural communities is allowing food service providers to reach many more kids with meals thanks to pick-up and delivery options.

These innovations and policy wins have helped feed millions more children each day.

But with food prices unusually high — an issue acknowledged by presidential candidates of both parties — lawmakers on both sides of the aisle must come together and support an anti-hunger agenda.

Just as school meals are an important part of a vision for a country without child hunger, so are investments in programs that connect families with the economic resources they need.

This year, Congress had the opportunity to expand the Child Tax Credit and extend a lifeline to families with very little income, ensuring they could receive the full refundable credit for every kid in the household and ultimately reducing . But though the measure passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House, it was blocked in the Senate. With major tax policy negotiations on the horizon in 2025, lawmakers should prioritize reinstating an expanded Child Tax Credit.

When lawmakers make feeding children a priority, families get transformational improvements like the new Summer EBT program that launched this year, providing food assistance to the families of an estimated 22 million kids. It’s the first new federal nutrition program in decades, working alongside traditional summer meals offerings to make sure kids get the food they need during the hungriest time of year. 

Yet, in this first year, 13 states did not participate, leaving money on the table that could have fed an and helped their families stretch their food budgets. Summer EBT is a tremendous opportunity to end hunger when school is out. All 50 states must opt in.

Federal nutrition programs and tax benefits for working families are really investments in opportunity for everyone. School meals create the opportunity to learn. Summer EBT creates the opportunity for families to eat healthy all year round. The Child Tax Credit creates opportunities to achieve economic mobility. And the aspiration for opportunity truly is universal.These programs aren’t just good policy; they’re good politics, too. conducted statewide polls this year in , , and , and in all four states, respondents were nearly unanimous (93% agreement or above) that ending childhood hunger should be a shared bipartisan goal. In an election year that’s likely to see precincts won on slim margins, it’s prudent that aspiring leaders keep this in mind.

For many New Hampshire public school students, getting breakfast at school is not a priority.

The Granite State has one of the largest divides in the country between the number of school breakfasts eaten and the number of school lunches eaten, from the Food Research and Action Center. While an average of 95,337 students per day ate school-provided lunch in the 2021-2022 school year, fewer than half of those students – 45,192 – also ate breakfast, the center found in a 2023 report.

That ratio puts New Hampshire in the bottom 16 states in the country. Now, educators and child anti-hunger advocates are urging Granite State schools to increase their promotion of school breakfasts and make it easier for students to eat them.

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“School breakfast has maybe a bad rap,” said Amy Hollar, the SNAP-Ed director at the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension. “… It’s better than it used to be. And it can get even better the more of us that embrace it and work together to make school meals a priority.”

This school year, nine school districts are competing in the School Breakfast Challenge, in which each district will attempt to increase the number of students eating breakfast by the highest percentage by March.

Organized by New Hampshire Hunger Solutions, an advocacy group, as well as the UNH Cooperative Extension and the New England Dairy Council, the competition aims to empower and encourage schools to launch campaigns promoting breakfast.

Educators and child anti-hunger advocates say school breakfasts help increase nutrition, boost attentiveness, and increase reimbursement to schools.

“We know that kids that eat school breakfast miss less school,” said Hollar. “They’re more alert and focused.”

The competition has been accompanied by a series of webinars to give school administrators ideas on how to boost breakfast participation. And it follows a template crafted in part by the University of Minnesota, which helped spearhead a four-year project in that state to do the same.

Riona Corr, deputy director of New Hampshire Hunger Solutions, said school meals are important in making sure students have consistent energy throughout the day.

And she said bringing in more students for breakfast would increase the amount they are reimbursed, which could help address school lunch debt.

The Food Research and Action Center found that New Hampshire schools could collectively receive $8.6 million more in school meal reimbursements per year if 70 percent of the students who eat lunch at school also ate breakfast.

“Say there’s 50 percent of the school who’s participating in free and reduced lunch,” Corr said. “Why is only 8 percent of those kids participating in free breakfast?”

For schools looking to expand breakfasts, educators have strategies. Schools should make the food more convenient to access and provide more flexibility to students about when they can eat it, they say.

Advocates are pushing “breakfast after the bell,” an approach in which schools allow students to pick up and eat breakfasts after the first class begins. Many schools require students eating breakfast to do so before that first period, which researchers say discourages many from doing it.

“A lot of schools – nationwide, not just in New Hampshire – are allowing breakfast before the first bell, and then not allowing kids to eat afterward,” said Corr.

Under the “breakfast after the bell” model, schools are encouraged to allow breakfast to be eaten in the classrooms, or in an area more convenient than the cafeteria. That could include tables with to-go food bags near entrances, or grab-and-go carts in the hallway.

And students are given more time to eat those meals, even if class has begun.

Meanwhile the UNH Cooperative Extension has developed a toolkit for “nudges,” or techniques school administrators can use to remind students about the breakfasts and encourage them to eat. The tips range from ways to incorporate nutrition advice into classroom curricula to pre-written jokes about breakfast that can be read out over the loudspeakers.

The challenge offers schools three participation tiers with increasing levels of commitment. Tier one is deploying the “‘nudges”; tier two involves attending New Hampshire Hunger Solutions’ webinar series; and tier three involves developing an action plan for a broader campaign.

For schools putting in the effort, the challenge has a modest cash prize for the largest increase in school breakfast take up: The Dairy Council has donated $1,000, which will be distributed to two of the winners, Corr said.

But the competition is only a piece of the overall effort, advocates say. The Cooperative Extension and New Hampshire Hunger Solutions are working with school food service directors and wellness committees to develop campaigns tailored to each district’s challenges and needs, Corr said.

“Where is your barrier? Is it administration? Is it teachers? Is it students?” Corr said.

Those challenges can be hard for some schools to overcome. In some cases, low cafeteria staffing levels can hamper some of the more innovative ideas. Other times, custodial staff will raise concerns with additional cleaning needed if schools allow eating in classrooms.

Students face stigmas associated with school breakfasts. And parents might assume that the breakfasts are not nutritious, thinking back to their own childhood experiences.

All of those hurdles can be overcome, Corr said, but some are more entrenched than others. It’s why the campaign is focusing on nudges as a low-cost way to get involved without overextending staff resources.

In continuing its campaign, New Hampshire advocates are following the footsteps of the University of Minnesota, which in 2013 launched its own breakfast promotion program in 16 high schools across the state.

Nutritionists at the University of Minnesota kept tabs on the schools, sorting some into control groups that received fewer resources and others into experimental groups that received budgets to launch ad campaigns.

One school took on a Hunger Games theme in an homage to the film series that had just opened in theaters, complete with lighthearted videos. Others tried taste tests where kitchen staff would experiment with new variations of recipes like banana bread and students would vote on their favorites.

“There was one school where the admin was, oh my gosh, 110 percent on board,” said Mary Schroeder, an extension educator for health and nutrition at the University of Minnesota. That school produced a video that included every student in the school, she added.

In one of the most innovative and effective strategies, several schools offered free breakfast for all students one day a week, carving out money in its budget to do so. That allowed everyone to try the food without fear of stigma, and helped to combat negative perceptions students may have had about its quality, Schroeder said.

“When they did their pre surveys … many children said that they didn’t like the taste of school breakfast,” Schroeder said. “But then when they asked other questions, they realized a lot of the kids who didn’t like the taste of school breakfast had never eaten school breakfast.”

The program, which lasted four years, produced strong results: The schools in the experimental group that received funding and pursued the recommended strategies saw a 49 percent higher increase in breakfast takeup than those that didn’t, from the extension. And the extra takeup in meals brought in between $90 to $489 per day in reimbursement money to the schools, after accounting for the program start-up costs.

This year, Minnesota lawmakers made the breakfast pitch much easier: The legislature passed a universal school breakfast law making them free for all students.

New Hampshire does not pay for universal school lunches or breakfasts; students who want breakfast will need to pay full price if their family makes more than 185 percent of the federal poverty level.

But advocates in the Granite State say strong efforts by schools can create a word-of-mouth effect that can get more kids buying the breakfasts anyway, benefitting the school and themselves.

“We want to make sure that we can promote a culture where it’s great to eat breakfast at school, because for some kids that’s the only place they’re gonna get it,” said Hollar.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .

Heather Cook slices bright cherry tomatoes then places the halves into a glass bowl in her kitchen in Barboursville.

On a Friday in July, she’s preparing what she calls an “easy caprese” salad. Next, it’s time to add cheese.

Though she’s alone in her kitchen, kids and adults around West Virginia are watching her step-by-step cooking demonstration via Facebook live. The virtual cooking class, offered through programming, aims to teach kids and families how to grow and cook their own food in an effort to boost nutrition and affordability.

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Cook, 35, said into her iPhone, held by a tripod, “Most of us love cheese, right? You can use cheese sticks.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced WVU Extension to offer its Family Nutrition Program classes exclusively online in 2020, health educators started reaching kids and families they’d previously never seen in person in the 40 counties they serve. In turn, they created a full-time online instructor position this year in an effort to combat the state’s childhood nutrition insecurity.

“A lot of parents work and can’t make it, or we’ve also seen a lot of parents who don’t have transportation,” said Cook, who stepped into the new virtual instructor position after nearly 10 years with WVU Extension. “Doing the virtual classes, it opened up a good opportunity for them to participate.

One in seven children in West Virginia don’t have access to enough food as food bank employees say hunger is worsening in the state.

Cook, who grew up in Southern West Virginia, said she knew firsthand how difficult it can be for families to access affordable produce due to the declining number of grocery stores in the mostly rural state and state’s poverty rate.

“I see a lot of people who are struggling to feed their families,” she said.

Nutrition insecurity expanding in West Virginia

In the last few years, West Virginia’s food banks have reported increased hunger numbers due to pandemic-spurred job loss, pandemic-related benefits ending and rising food prices.

Kristin McCartney is a public health specialist and the director of the SNAP education programs with WVU Extension.

“Even though we think of a select group of people being food insecure, it’s really expanded,” she said, adding that their internal surveys of families show that more families who don’t qualify for emergency food assistance are struggling to have enough food for their families.

Food bank employees have anticipated more food needs this year as the state will this fall for some adults receiving SNAP benefits. In West Virginia, nearly of households receiving SNAP benefits have children, and anti-hunger advocates said thousands of SNAP recipients could lose their benefits due to the work requirement.

The WVU Extension Family Nutrition Program work is supported by SNAP funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service.

While the program still offers in-person nutrition education, its virtual programming has enabled employees to reach all 55 counties and offer programs to a wider range of ages. The program has a , which features healthy recipes, food safety tips, food preservation instruction, shopping tips and more. It has more than 69,000 views.

In her virtual cooking classes, Cook tries to select recipes that kids can do with minimal adult help or with ingredients that they have on hand. She regularly helps kids find ingredient substitutions.

“The classes are geared toward younger kids making healthy snacks, like a snack mix or a smoothie where you put all the materials in a Ziploc bag and use a straw or a spoon,” she explained.

Along with classes like Cook’s, WVU Extension this summer is offering in-person nutrition classes and a kids’ market program where nearly 4,000 families are eligible for $30 to $60 to spend on fresh produce at local grocery stores.

There’s also a “Grow This” program that offers free seeds and gardening instruction to residents. Last year, 73,000 people participated in the program, according to WVU Extension.

One of Cook’s virtual classes focuses on helping kids and families learn how to garden. Families who signed up for the course received compostable “grow bags” — a shopping bag that is suited for growing — along with seeds for microgreens, kale, mini bell peppers and purple carrots. The grow bag idea came out of employees’ realization that some participating families didn’t have yard space for a garden.

During an online Zoom meeting, Cook taught participants how to shred notebook paper to create a compost layer and how to properly water their plants.

“I love this program because we are trying to go back to how our grandparents did things and trying to be able to provide for yourself,” Cook said after the class. “I love that we are able to teach them to grow their own food and how to make healthy choices.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

In North Carolina’s push to curb childhood hunger, schools will provide locally sourced food to millions of youth this summer.

The North Carolina summer nutrition program offers free meals to kids and teenagers under the age of 18. Administered by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the program typically takes place in “economically distressed areas” so that they can serve the most food-insecure students. While students receive meals in school, once the academic year ends, they might not have enough food at home.

According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, 1.2 million people experience food insecurity — 394,000 of them children.

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The support comes in lieu of the dwindling resources from the federal COVID-19 public health emergency.

NCDPI calls on sponsors of the summer meal program to participate in the . This includes serving locally sourced foods, connecting farmers with communities to learn about agriculture and nutrition, and hosting cooking classes.

The public will be able to access food from schools, public housing centers, playgrounds, camps, parks, medical centers, faith-based facilities, and libraries. Providers also offer fitness activities for children and their general communities.

In a press release, State Superintendent Catherine Truitt expressed concerns about acquiring community sponsors.

“Our goal is to increase the number of community sponsors that can partner with us to help provide reimbursable meals to food-insecure children,” Truitt said. “School and summer meals provide students with essential nutrition for growth, development, and learning. Participation in school and Summer Nutrition Programs also provide educational enrichment and support social-emotional learning.”

More families might rely on summer meal programs as the resources from the P-EBT program subside. P-EBT is a temporary service that distributes food assistance benefits to eligible families during the COVID-19 public health emergency, which ended on May 11.

Eligible children and teens who attended school in person during the school year will receive a one-time benefits payment over the summer if they applied by the end of May.

NCDHHS aims to reduce the food insecurity rate from its current 10.9% to 10% by December 2024.

Statewide, there is a push to get more citizens food and nutrition services and to increase participation in the Special Supplemental nutrition program for women and children. They also want to get more community-based organizations involved and increase breastfeeding support services.

These strategies are outlined in the .

“We often take for granted the healthy and nutritious food we keep in our refrigerators and pantries — but many families struggle to put food on the table every day,” said NCDHHS Chief Deputy Secretary for Opportunity and Well-Being Susan Gale Perry. “Our goal with this plan is to ensure everyone can get the food and nutrition they need to thrive, and fewer North Carolinians experience hunger.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on and .

The lion’s share of Hoosier schools that qualify for don’t take advantage of it, according to a new national report.

Across the country, 6,419 school districts — 67.5 percent of those eligible — adopted the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) in one or more schools for the 2022– 2023 school year, the (FRAC) reported in a .

But in Indiana, only 40.6% of eligible school districts — and 51.7% of eligible schools overall —  adopted CEP in the most recent academic year.

Although Indiana was among the 39 states that saw an increase in the number of schools adopting community eligibility, the Hoosier state still ranks 47th in the nation for CEP participation.

The program allows schools with high poverty rates to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of their economic status. Child health advocates and education experts laud the federal provision as a benefit to both students and school administrators.

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No Kid Hungry, a non-profit organization that focuses on increasing access to healthy meals for children and alleviating childhood hunger, emphasized that kids are more attentive in class, have better attendance and are less likely to have disciplinary problems when their nutritional needs are met.

With CEP, families with tight food budgets are also ensured that their child is getting two balanced meals at school, reducing financial strain at home.

The program works for schools, as well, by eliminating school meals applications and unpaid meal charges that often create administrative burdens.

Some schools have recently adopted CEP as a way to continue offering healthy meals to all students — free of charge — after the expiration of the pandemic child nutrition waivers last year, according to FRAC.

But researchers said that many schools, including some in Indiana, choose not to participate out of fear that losing data from school meal applications may also result in the loss of Title 1 funding.

Indiana schools and districts have until June 30 to submit a CEP application for the 2023-24 school year. It’s not clear how many new applications have been submitted so far.

By the numbers

During the 2022–23 school year, there was a significant increase in the number of schools and districts nationwide participating in community eligibility, according to FRAC’s latest report.

While the number of participating schools in Indiana increased, too, the take-up rate among eligible schools overall decreased slightly.

Of the 1,148 schools eligible for CEP in the last school year, 593 participated, according to federal data collected by FARC. That’s up from 506 participating schools in the 2021-22 academic year, when 957 schools qualified.

Among those to join were in Indianapolis, which serves nearly 11,000 students.

Of the 469 eligible Indiana schools where more than 60% of students qualify as high-need under CEP guidelines, 311 participated in the federal program in the 2022-23 school year — a 66.3% adoption rate.

About 52% of Hoosier schools with 50-60% high-need students — 200 of the 356 eligible schools — signed up. Participation dropped to 24.5% for those schools with high-need student enrollment at or below 50%; of the 323 schools that were eligible, only 77 took advantage of the program.

The Indiana Department of Education estimates that at least 1,100 schools will qualify for CEP in the 2023-24 academic year.

How CEP works — and why it helps

Families are not required to submit an application for the community provision like they would for the free and reduced meals program. That guarantees free breakfast and lunch for any student at a participating school.

Indianapolis Public Schools, as well as the surrounding Perry, Warren and Wayne school districts, are continuing to offer free meals – both lunches and breakfasts – to students through CEP for the 2023-24 school year. Certain MSD of Lawrence Township schools are also participating in CEP to provide free meals.

Thousands of students at other Indianapolis-area schools — in the Decatur, Franklin, Speedway and Washington school districts — will not automatically get free food, though.

Some district officials they do not participate in CEP because of the federal program’s “complexity,” while others noted that their schools do not qualify for complete meal reimbursement, meaning districts have to pay out-of-pocket to cover the rest.

For a school to qualify for the CEP, at least 40% of the individual school’s enrolled population must already participate in another means-tested program or are part of a protected group, such as students experiencing homelessness, in foster care, or migrant students.

Schools that meet the minimum threshold to qualify for the community provision receive reimbursement for 62.5% of meals served, according to federal guidelines. Schools with enrolled populations over 62.5%, where nearly two-thirds of students fall into the above categories, get fully reimbursed for students’ meals.

Schools with higher numbers of students in need receive a near or total reimbursement for meals, which makes community eligibility a more financially viable option. That also makes them more likely to participate in community eligibility, according to FRAC.

While any school with an enrolled population of 40% or more can participate, many schools on the lower end of the scale “fear participating” because the level of reimbursement from the federal government would not fully cover the cost of all meals served to students, said Allyson Pérez, a child nutrition policy analyst with FRAC.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

But for too many families, the anticipation of a new school year is tempered by the persistent fear that their children won’t have enough to eat. 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, over in the United States are food insecure; 12 million of them are children. In 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed the and , which gave the department the authority to provide school meals — both breakfast and lunch — to all families, free of charge. As schools remained empty, these waivers empowered districts to literally meet hungry families where they were throughout the pandemic, whether delivering boxed meals to their homes or providing drive-up service in school parking lots. Unlike years prior, there were no prerequisites or requirements to prove need; all students and families were eligible.

Now, the government is grappling with whether schools can go back to the way things were before, and how — particularly as socioeconomic conditions worsen for families already living on the margins. Caregivers struggling to put food on the table breathe a little easier knowing their children have access to two meals a day in school and during the summer. Even families who never qualified before find themselves relying on what’s commonly known as the school lunch program.

On Sept. 28, the White House will host the for the first time since 1969. That original event has shaped the nation’s food policy agenda for the past 50 years, and now, the Biden administration will set the course for the future. The conference will focus on five pillars: improving food access and affordability, integrating nutrition and health, empowering all consumers to have access to healthy choices, supporting physical activity for all, and enhancing nutrition and food security research.

This is a unique opportunity to profoundly impact the health and well-being of all children. Even before the pandemic, advocates argued that children and families were slipping through the cracks, either because they didn’t apply for the school lunch program or fell short of eligibility. By enacting a universal free lunch program that eliminates the tedious application process and allows all students to eat at school, there will be no reason for any child to go hungry again. 

The benefits are many.

Ensuring that students are fed daily removes stress from teachers and school systems are already under unprecedented challenges as they cope with staffing shortages, learning gaps from two years of remote school and increasing . The fact is that hungry children can’t learn, but when students are provided with , behavior issues go down, focus improves, test scores go up and attendance increases. When schools are part of a wider network of social service and clinical providers, they can connect struggling families with additional resources, whether it’s a food bank, an employment agency or a counseling center, because more often than not, a family that is food insecure has other unmet needs as well. 

But beyond nutrition, there’s another strong argument to providing universal free school meals: It reduces the for students on traditional free and reduced-fee programs, because there’s no longer a difference between them and their peers in the cafeteria. Without the worry that others are judging, it’s that students’ anxiety will be reduced, potentially improving their overall mental health. As school-based mental health providers work overtime to address an ever-increasing list of student needs, this is a welcome, much-needed support. 

When families have their basic needs met, students are better prepared to learn, and school staff can spend less time finding food for hungry students and more on teaching them what they need to learn. Enacting a national free lunch program won’t be easy; there are logistics, costs and political will involved. But children are this country’s most important natural resource. Investing in their health and well-being directly impacts the nation’s economic and social future.

St. Andrew distributed 46 million pounds of food in 2021, about half of which is gleaned, or recovered after the first harvest. With operations in 22 states, the four-decades-old organization specializes in doing good locally. According to Johnson, more than half of the recovered food makes it someone’s table the same night that it’s gleaned, often within just a few miles of the field where it was grown. “It’s really a neighbor-helping-neighbor model of addressing hunger,” she says.

Here are 5 lessons from Johnson about cultivating literally and figuratively.

1. The Good Book is a good place to start. “The staff and I,” Johnson says, “come to this work because we feel called to it.” The nonprofit is named for the apostle Andrew, who spoke to the boy who offered to share his five loaves and two fish with Jesus — who then fed thousands by multiplying this offering. Johnson explains that the Bible commands followers “to care for the people who did not have land on which to grow food. The poor are allowed to harvest the corners of every field.”

Similarly, farmers can harvest a field once, but the poor are granted the second harvest. She explains, “We’ve adapted that principle for use today. We send volunteers in the fields to pick, dig or gather whatever’s left over after commercial harvest.” That food — the gleanings — are distributed to agencies nearby that feed hungry people.

2. No farms, no food. Most of us don’t know or think about where our food comes from. Food systems are designed to keep consumers happily oblivious. As an example, Johnson notes that junk food is often very heavily subsidized. “Someone who’s hungry can go buy a Twinkie for $0.79 or an apple for $0.79, and while the apple is better for them, it has only 70 calories and isn’t going to fill them up, and the Twinkie will have 300 calories and they can go to bed and sleep tonight.”

St. Andrew fights hunger in part by reacquainting volunteers with the farmers who grow our potatoes, broccoli and green beans.  Many of its farmer partnerships go back decades, enduring good times and bad. “It’s about that feeling deep down inside, doing what you know is right,” says Brent Barbee of Barbee Farms in North Carolina.

farms account for 21% of all food waste in the United States. You know who hates that statistic the most? “Farmers don’t want the food to rot in the field,” Johnson says. That’s their worst nightmare, because they’ve used the land, they’ve used their resources, their time and everything else to grow that food.”

St. Andrew provides a service by collecting food that that the farmer would not be able to sell otherwise. Farmers can get a federal tax credit for the food that they give the organization.

3. Volunteers make it work. In an average, non-COVID year, 30,000 volunteers give about 90,000 volunteer hours through St. Andrew. (After a sudden steep decline at the start of the pandemic, numbers are climbing back up.) a day or two ahead of time.

“Gleaning with St. Andrew,” Johnson says, “is one of the few things that I know of in current society that the whole family can do together in a meaningful way. We have kids as young as, well as infants, strapped to their parents’ backs gleaning with us, and certainly at 1 or 2 actively taking part in the gleaning.”

Johnson says that volunteers report eating differently and seeing food differently after their experience. “Farmers are getting just 4% or 8% of what they pay at the grocery store for food,” she explains, “whereas if they’re buying it directly from the farmer, the farmer’s getting 100%.”

Volunteers might start shopping at farmer’s markets and farm stands more often. “After they’ve gleaned with us, they actually talk to farmers like they’re real people,” she laughs. Moreover, volunteers who unload food might discover a food pantry or soup kitchen, becoming activists in the campaign against hunger. “You can’t truly appreciate the weight, the importance, or the accessibility of gleaning, until you do it,” says Jim, a volunteer in Ohio.

4. Go for you dream job, but be patient. Johnson has been with St. Andrew a little over 12 years, with nearly half of that time in the executive director role, but the organization was on her radar long before that. In 1986, while working as a church educator in South Carolina, she read a magazine article about St. Andrew’s retreat, which educates participants about hunger, introduces them to gleaning and encourages them to commit to serving others. The story stayed with her. And wouldn’t let go.

“For 30 years, whenever I got really tired of my job, I’d go to the website and see if there was a  job I could afford to take. My children got so tired of me talking about how much I wanted to work there. Then one day the opportunity came up, and here I am.”

5. Look out for curve balls. Shortly after starting at St. Andrew, Johnson learned that her son, a second-year law student, had a brain tumor. “Everybody’s struggling with something,” she observes, saying she spent most of this period worrying from afar.

Today, Jake Patterson, 29, is a practicing attorney. Johnson’s daughter, 26, is a wildland firefighter in Northern Calif., and her youngest is 21. He’s in the army stationed in Tacoma, Wash. The pandemic, of course, was another kind of nasty surprise. You can’t glean by Zoom, but Johnson and her team quickly adapted. Because of their participation in the program (now discontinued), they distributed more pounds of food than ever in 2020 and 2021.

For the farmers, the volunteers and, especially, the 18.6 million people who eat the food their efforts makes available, Lynette Johnson and the Society of St. Andrew are truly making a difference.

In Washington state and Texas, one study found 42% of child care workers experienced food insecurity, experiencing very high food insecurity. High food insecurity is when a person reports reduced quality and variety of diet. Very high food insecurity occurs when a person reports disrupted eating patterns and .

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Another study in Arkansas found that .

Effects of food insecurity

People who are food insecure are at increased chances of being poor health, with conditions like hypertension, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression, among other chronic diseases and .

Low wages and food insecurity may contribute to child care workers’ . When child care workers experience stress, they tend to reduce the amount of positive attention to children and increase their punitive responses to .

Causes of food insecurity

Overall, child care workers’ wages are low, with the median hourly wage being . This means child care workers make little more than , whose median pay is . What child care workers make is not considered a .

As a result of low wages, , including Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from 2014 to 2016. This compares with the who received public assistance in that period. When so many child care workers rely on public assistance, it reveals how many of them don’t make enough money to get by.

Nearly all U.S. child care workers are . This workforce is central to providing to children up to 5 years old.

Early childhood researchers and policymakers have focused on increasing the education and training of the child care workforce to bolster quality. The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment that lead teachers, the primary teachers in early childhood classrooms who are responsible for day-to-day management of a classroom, at least have a bachelor’s degree and that assistant teachers at least have a child development associate certificate or equivalent. Despite the fact that the more education child care workers have the they deliver, many states require only , and some states do not have any education requirements for entry-level positions.

On average, child care workers who have a bachelor’s degree do . However, going to college for child care workers as it does for those in other fields. Child care workers with a bachelor’s degree average $14.70 per hour, which is of those with a bachelor’s degree – $27 per hour.

It’s one thing to expect child care workers to get more education to become better at what they do. But it is also important to ensure that additional education pays off.

Policymakers have recently focused on child care workers’ wages. For example, the Build Back Better legislation to meet the cost of care for children from birth to 5 years old. The cost of care would include wages.

is a doctoral candidate and research assistant at The Ohio State University.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

For the first time in her life, Giselle Paredes needs help feeding her family.

“Many times I don’t have something to cook so I’m like, ‘what am I going to do?’” Paredes said. “They’re hungry because they’re studying.”

The 45-year-old wife and mother of two says she has little time to focus on her own educational studies as an El Paso Community College accounting student while also caring for her household.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how college students often struggle fulfilling basic needs such as food and shelter while pursuing an education. In 2019, in the prior 30 days, including 48% of community college students. That was before the pandemic and the economic disruptions it caused.

In March, EPCC released findings of a that surveyed students about their basic needs during the pandemic. Of the 1,399 students that participated, 39% experienced food insecurity 30 days prior.

“I feel bad to say help me with food or cooking,” Paredes said about her two children, one a university student and the other a high school student.

What’s behind food insecurity

The U.S. Department of Agriculture as, “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”

In its simplest understanding, “food insecurity basically means people don’t know where their next meal is coming from,” said , CEO of El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank.

Goodell said that food insecurity is a transient issue and typically not a permanent condition.

“Some people are chronically food insecure but that’s not the majority,” Goodell said. “Typically people will come into food insecurity and leave food insecurity rather fluidly.”

High levels of poverty and what are known as “”— asset limited, income-constrained, employed — are closely correlated factors that may contribute to El Pasoans being food insecure, Goodell said.

“People are working but not bringing enough income to pay for basic needs,” Goodell said of the ALICE category.

In 2018, El Paso had a 15% rate of food insecurity and 125,910 people were food insecure, according to the latest . El Paso’s food insecurity rate was the same as the state of Texas.

“Most of us think of food as a humanitarian issue, but when we look at the issue from a societal aspect we quickly come to the realization that food impacts every other aspect of life. It’s not just a humanitarian issue, it’s a human rights issue,” Goodell said.

Those who find themselves food insecure may feel that others are looking down on them, she said.

“The stigma around food insecurity is pretty pervasive,” she said. “People often feel ashamed when they cannot feed themselves and their family. I can understand that feeling but I believe people deserve food because they’re human beings.”

In 2017, the El Paso Fighting Hunger Food Bank provided 10.5 million pounds of food to El Pasoans. That increased to 139.7 million pounds of food during the pandemic year of 2020.

But that’s still not enough. “Our challenge is finding enough food to meet the needs of El Pasoans,” Goodell said.

Insecurity during a pandemic

Paredes said she is grateful that she can receive help from EPCC to feed her family.

“It was amazing for me to open my email and see there’s a lot of help,” Paredes said.

“They came to my house, they used gloves, masks and I was like, oh woah,” Paredes remembered. “I remember that day. I was busy and was so grateful there was food.”

Under the instruction of , who created the program in April 2020 with the help of other faculty members, the program has become an extension of the school’s culinary program.

“When Hurricane Katrina happened and they brought folks out of New Orleans to El Paso, EPCC was there. We set up in the convention center, served meals to those folks three times a day and we were involved,” Guerra recalled.

Now with a pandemic impacting his hometown, Guerra said he felt like he was sitting on the sidelines.

“I felt terrible because I couldn’t do anything for my students,” he said.

A year later, the program has expanded outside of its original seven faculty members and now includes the participation of students who help make weekly meals.

With collaboration from the school’s , Guerra is able to directly contact students who have filled out the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) forms or emergency aid forms directly provided by EPCC.

Paredes said she filled out the CARES form to indicate her household was food insecure. Soon after, she received a call asking if she would like food to be delivered to her home.

“It was my first time filling out the form,” Paredes said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Among the 39% of students who surveyed as food insecure, almost half were worried that they would run out of food before having money to buy more, according to EPCC survey data.

“We don’t just feed the student, we feed the family,” said , EPCC’s director of student leadership and life.

Jones, who helps oversee the school’s Tejano Food Pantry, said despite survey results of a high need for food for students, the number who utilize the food pantry is low. She suspects that students are using other food banks and receiving help elsewhere.

“We want students to know it’s there if they want to use it,” Jones said.  

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.