INDIANAPOLIS – It's a bill that could have a huge impact on what your child pays for school lunch, or whether they have to pay for it at all.
In Wayne Township, at 11 schools, when kids go through the cafeteria line they don’t have to pay a single thing for food.
More than 40 percent of kids in those schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. So, under current federal law, the school can offer free lunch to all students in that building.
Now, Congressman Rep. Todd Rokita (R-4) is proposing a change via House Resolution 5003.
It would change the qualifications for schools to get the OK to give free lunches to all students. Students who outright qualify for free lunch would still get them at schools, regardless of the school's overall poverty status.
The bill would require that at least 60 percent – instead of 40 – of students qualify for free or reduced lunch in order for all students to get it free.
It’s estimated there are 121 schools in Indiana that would be affected by this.
So for schools that aren’t quite at the 60-percent poverty line, they would lose their all-student free lunch programs. Only students who qualify would get free lunches at those schools.
Wayne Township says that would impact a huge number of kids, even if they don’t technically meet the specifications of being “impoverished.”
“In pretty much every building we have, there are students who are right on the threshold,” Wayne Township Nutrition Director Sara Gasiorowski said. “They just make a little too much money and for them to have to pay for meals is a real financial burden.”
If free lunch isn’t offered anymore, districts say parents may have to pull money from other family resources to feed their kids.
They might start sending the kids with sack lunches, and if fewer kids are eating in the cafeteria, that could mean layoffs.
The bottom line for Wayne Township? The current program works and the district doesn’t want to see it disappear at its schools.
Congressman Todd Rokita issued the following statement regarding the Improving Child Nutrition and Education Act.
Our bill in no way alters the eligibility requirements for students who receive free or reduced priced lunches. Again: not one student currently eligible for meal assistance would be ineligible under this proposal. The current rules for the Community Eligibility Program (CEP) are perverse, as they incentivize schools to be paid for giving out meals to all students, even to those whose families can or do pay for their kids’ lunches. Under current law, a school can be reimbursed by taxpayers for offering meal assistance to every student even if just a mere 40% are eligible. This means that schools can have taxpayers pay for every meal in a school even when a majority of students are not even eligible for assistance. By increasing that requirement to 60%, we at least make sure that a small majority of students actually qualify for the taxpayer-subsidized meal, before taxpayers pay for all students to receive them. This is hardly an unreasonable or unfair threshold. We then use the savings from the CEP reforms to fund the other improvements in the proposal so they don’t add to the debt. Our bill actually provides a higher reimbursement for breakfast – a rate that hasn’t been adjusted since the 1980’s! We would also use funds to provide better access to summer meals, making it easier for poor students to receive nutrition even when school is not in session. We also stop several school lunch "standards" championed by Mrs. Obama that only have resulted in food being thrown away. These are reforms school administrators and health experts have said they wanted for years. Ensuring that students in actual need have these strong protections in place is how we the people should judge our success, not by how much paperwork an administrator has to do or how much money a school can make off of the entire school population.
