I have firsthand experience with poverty and lacking food or money for lunch at school. Neither of my parents were all that concerned about whether I had lunch at school. Some days, I didn’t eat lunch. Other days, I either packed a lunch (if food was available), stole money from my dad to pay for lunch, or “borrowed ” money from my wealthy friends whose fathers worked for Marathon Oil. What follows is an article by Marty Schladen about the push to make lunch FREE for all Ohio students.
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Many people might not be aware of this, but a big majority of Ohio’s public-school students already receive free breakfast and lunch at school.
Making free meals available to all students wouldn’t only produce benefits equal to the costs, it would produce social benefits with a net worth of about $520 million a year, according to an economic analysis released last Monday.
Lower-income Americans have lost significant ground over the past 40 years. In some ways, that trend might be accelerating.
More than 1 in 4 Ohioans are now poor enough to be on Medicaid, for example, and their access to education is diminishing.
Even adjusting for inflation, college tuition has tripled. Meanwhile, when also adjusted for inflation, the maximum available Pell Grant hasn’t budged.
Education is a powerful predictor of future earnings. Yet even after the pandemic, chronic absenteeism in Ohio schools sits at 25.6% — up nine percentage points from its pre-pandemic level in 2018-2019.
And more than half a million Ohio kids — 1 in 5 — are dealing with food insecurity.
And the state’s schools reported that in the 2021-2022 school year, more than 26,000 of their kids “lacked a fixed, regular, and adequate place to sleep,” the Ohio Housing Finance Agency reported.
The Columbus firm Scioto Analysis examined what would happen if a relatively modest step were taken to help the state’s children.
Already, more than 60% of students whose schools participate in the national school lunch program are getting free meals.
What would happen if the state just paid so all students could get them?
State Sens. Louis Blessing III, R-Colerain Township, and Kent Smith, D-Euclid, earlier this year introduced a bill that would extend free meals to all Ohio school kids. But it was assigned to a committee and died.
At $300 million a year, the program was relatively inexpensive — given that the legislature’s Republican leadership found twice that amount to give the billionaire Haslam family to move the hapless Browns outside Cleveland city limits.
Three days after receiving the gift, the Tennessee-based moguls bought a $25 million mansion — in Florida.
The Scioto Analysis study used the projected cost of the Blessing bill as a starting point and tried to compare the costs to the benefits.
An obvious benefit would be to ensure that more kids had access to healthy meals.
“… a study comparing schools that offered universal free school meals… to similar schools that did not offer universal free school meals found that children in schools with universal free school meals had lower household food insecurity,” the report said.
“U.S. data found that universal free school meals provided through the Community Eligibility Provision would make 3% of previously food-insecure children in participating schools food-secure.”
Another benefit would be that if all kids got free meals, then no one would be stigmatized as poor for getting them.
That one might be hard to measure, but anybody who’s been to school knows how cruel children can be.
With a quarter of kids already chronically absent, the last thing they need is another reason to want to avoid school.
Other potential benefits are easier to quantify: Money and time saved by families, reductions in obesity, greater administrative efficiency for schools that don’t have to keep track of whose meal bills are paid, and improved lifetime earnings by kids who are well nourished and ready to learn.
The analysis said that last benefit would by far be the most valuable, determining it would create $552 million in annual economic benefit.
In all, it said, universal school meals would create $52o million more in annual benefits than the program would cost.
“Based on the available research about the health, educational, and economic benefits of universal free school meals for students of all incomes — even those who are already eligible for free meals through existing programs — I believe universal free school meals are a worthwhile investment for Ohio,” Emily Cantrell, the policy analyst who wrote the report, said in an accompanying blog post.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Come on Ohio. Get with the program! Our school district in upstate New York started providing free breakfast and lunch to all students. When school is out there are summer meal programs and also free breakfast and lunch available to anyone attending summer school. This has been a big relief because at least we know that our son will have enough to eat when money’s tight. This is especially important to me because our home was food insecure when I was growing up. Even with two working parents who were very good managing the money they made in blue-collar jobs and we’re not wasteful, there were times when it was nearly impossible to scrape lunch money together for three kids. Since pay fluctuated, we were always bouncing between quality for free or reduced -price lunch and full-priced lunch. School breakfast wasn’t a thing yet back then. I doubt that many of the people in government who are making the decisions about things like this ever had to go without a meal as kid. They sit in their offices thinking blissfully about how their June Cleaver mom always made them a sandwich on Wonder Bread (cut diagonally and crusts lovingly removed). They probably had that extra pocket change to buy a popsicle or ice cream bar to chase their Wonder Bread with. Lucky them. Some of us had to eat the crusts (whether we liked it or not) because tossing them out was wasteful. We rarely if ever had the money for the after-lunch treat. We got to sit there choking back tears while other kids enjoyed them, wondering in shame why our parents were so poor. Of course this was before the days when every kid had a lunch number to enter into the computer, so this shame followed the shame of having to get your lunch card punched. Of course they were a different color if you got free or reduced lunch, so EVERYONE could see that you were poor. It was so humiliating that when I was in high school I’d often skip lunch or pack an inadequate one to avoid the embarrassment of going through the lunch line with the differently-colored lunch card. I can tell you from personal experience that it has an impact on a kid’s self-esteem and mental health. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t evoke such strong feelings in me decades later! Now since all the kids in our district get free meals, at least the cafeteria can be one place where everyone can feel equal. Rich kids and poor kids both eat the school lunches and everyone just keys in their student number. No one has to know that the school meals are the only meals some kids get each day. I love that they also have a backpack program that provides food to get gets who need it through the weekend. In addition, the have a sort of food and clothing pantry at the school where kids who need them can get extra food if they need it, as well as new or gently-used clothes that have been donated. If kids can’t afford things like underwear and toiletry items, they help they them with that as well. It may be hard to grasp for people in government who never had to go without but THESE THINGS MATTER. So time to step up your game, Ohio.
This post reminds me of something that’s purely anecdotal, but here goes…
My mother told me this a few years ago when she worked for the North Baltimore Public School District. Mom said she had asked a young boy if he was excited about summer vacation. He looked down shamefacedly and said that he wasn’t excited. When my mom followed up with asking why, he said because he gets his food at school. Hearing that story made my gut twist. Many people assume that all kids have a stable home and food security. Far from the truth unfortunately. I find this issue a no brainer. Children shouldn’t go hungry.