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, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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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