Universal school meals take shame out of the equation. No kid should have to choose between going hungry or racking up debt their family can’t afford. And no kid should ever face the cruel practice of lunch-shaming where they are singled out in front of their classmates.
"At my school, you had to line up at morning break on a Monday to pay for the week's lunches. There were two lines — one for paying cash/check, and one for registering for free school lunches — so everyone knew whose families were struggling."
“I was in the third grade and I didn’t understand that you could be in debt, so I went to go get my lunch and the lady told me ‘you can’t have that,’ so she gave me a cheese sandwich and my friends began teasing me and I started crying,” said Ciel, an 18-year-old from El Paso, Texas, whose last name has been withheld for privacy reasons. “It’s so obvious when you are in lunch debt because they give you the ‘other’ meal. It was a horrifying experience as a 9-year-old that made me afraid to get lunch from school.” Prism Reports
In 2020, when schools across the country closed to slow the spread of Covid-19, federal lawmakers did something unprecedented: They decided to pay for free lunch for every public school student in America, every day, no questions asked. Millions of children rely on free or reduced price meals at school, and policymakers knew that need would only grow as families faced a devastating pandemic.
The effect of the free meals was dramatic. ... food insecurity in at-risk households with children declined by about 7 percentage points between the beginning of the pandemic and summer 2021.
Prism Reports follows up on the predictable aftermath: Students are struggling with school lunch debt.
Students from low-income families across the country are accruing school lunch debt in record numbers. Federal data shows that participation in school lunch programs dropped by 23% after pandemic-era free lunch programs ended. A recent survey by the School Nutrition Association found that students across the country are burdened with more than $19 million in school lunch debt.