A food fight over free school lunch

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0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. And I'm Waylon Wong. Darian, if you couldn't already tell from the smell of sharpened number two pencils in the air, it's back to school season. I was wondering what that smell was. And one aspect of U.S. educational policy has become a particular flashpoint in the presidential election cycle. School meals and which students should get to eat for free. Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz made school meals free as governor of Minnesota. He touted this policy in his speech last week at the Democratic National Convention. So while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.

0:55Meanwhile, a group of House Republicans wants to get rid of an Obama-era program that allows universal access to free meals in low-income school districts. So school meals are political, to say the least. But you can't really dig into school meals without a big serving of our favorite topic, economics. It's a school food fight at the government policy level. Today on the show, we explore an important question at the heart of the economic debate about feeding students. What helps low-income children more, paying just for their meals or paying for everyone's meals?

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2:20With over 100 years of experience navigating the ups and downs of the market and of life, your Edward Jones financial advisor will be there to help you move ahead with confidence. because with all you've done to find your rich, they'll do all they can to help you keep enjoying it. Edward Jones, member SIPC. Feeding public school students in the U.S. is a huge undertaking. Almost 5 billion lunches were served last year, so that's a lot of tacos and fruit cups. Marcus Weaver Hightower is a professor at Virginia Tech. He's also the author of the book Unpacking School Lunch, Understanding the Hidden Politics of School Food.

2:59As I am an education policy person, I kind of was looking around for what I thought would be the most complex thing I could find about schools, and it happens to be school meals. Marcus says cafeterias operate kind of like their own businesses within schools, and a crucial part of their funding comes from the federal government in the form of reimbursements. The basic mechanism for how the school lunch program works, kid comes, they get a tray of food, cashier rings it up. And then he says the government pays for either the whole meal or part of it. This depends on whether the student pays full price, reduced price, or gets the meal for free.

3:39In terms of eligibility, a family of four on a little over$40 ,000 a year or less qualifies for free lunch. and a reduced lunch is for families earning just over$57 ,000 a year or less. Now, here's a number that gives you a sense of how many children rely on a subsidized meal. Last year, 71 % of lunches served were free or reduced. Yeah, I think a lot of people would be surprised by that statistic. And as we just said, the government reimburses all meals to some extent. Marcus says this adds up to a sizable price tag and to make meals universal would require even more resources. It's not a cheap program to feed kids in schools.

4:23I think currently it's at about$21 billion. I did some sort of back-of-the-envelope calculating and I think that, you know, to do universally free school meals for all kids would cost about double that. Still, Marcus says the meals are good value for families. Even when they're paying full price at the register, lunch typically costs just three bucks out of pocket. Now, as a public school parent, I will say I've looked askance at some of the food that gets served sometimes. The meals do have to meet certain nutritional standards to qualify for reimbursement. And there's been debate over things like, does the tomato sauce and pizza count as a vegetable?

5:01It's a fruit. Minor detail, Darian. Marcus says the food is generally considered healthy. Recent research has shown that in terms of nutrition, it's one of the best meals that you can get outside of your house. And, you know, where are you going to get a meal anywhere else that's going to cost you$3? It's going to be that nutritious. In some areas, the price is even lower. Rebecca Wood lives near Boston and is a mother to a sixth grader. When her daughter was younger and in elementary school, lunch cost$2.50. I don't think I could create a well-balanced meal to send with her for$2.50. I was talking with the vice principal.

5:43She mentioned Charlie always ate her vegetables. Charlie's my daughter. That's what every parent wants to hear. Right. And so they were serving her all of these foods that I think maybe if I served her at home, she wouldn't be interested in. But because she was eating them with her friends and it came from other trusted adults, she dug in. So even though Rebecca was happy that Charlie was getting a healthy, inexpensive lunch at school, meals were a source of stress for their family. Rebecca's income was too high to qualify for free or reduced lunch. And at the same time, she was a single parent grappling with high rent and medical expenses.

6:24And sometimes she had school lunch debt. I was constantly keeping account of what I had in the cupboard, how many cans of beans, did I have a loaf of bread, would we have enough, do we have the right things for a growing kid, that type of stuff. Then Rebecca learned about a federal program called the Community Eligibility Provision. It was first rolled out in 2011 during the Obama administration. Under this policy, if a certain percentage of the student population in a school or district qualifies for free meals, then all kids get free meals. Rebecca realized that her school district met the threshold but didn't participate in the program.

7:04So she pushed administrators to sign up, and they did. Later on, she joined up with an anti-hunger organization in Massachusetts called Project Bread to make universal free meals a statewide policy. Massachusetts made this a reality last year. It's now one of eight states with universal free school meals. Others include California, Michigan, and of course, Minnesota. For Rebecca, free meals as a statewide policy was a mental and financial relief. When her daughter started attending middle school in a new district, for example, Rebecca didn't have to worry about whether that district would meet the threshold for the community eligibility provision.

7:41That little bit of money, as small as it is, having that in my pocket, it gave me breathing room in my budget. The community eligibility provision is still around, but a recent budget proposal by a group of House Republicans calls for getting rid of the program. In its place, the federal government would give states chunks of money to spend more flexibly on child nutrition programs, and the money would only go to, quote, truly needy households. These lawmakers' objections flow into a larger debate around universal versus targeted policies. We saw a version of this play out around the expanded child tax credit that families received in 2021.

8:22Yeah, universal programs can come with a high price tag. Remember, Marcus Weaver Hightower estimates that making free school meals universal would roughly double the cost to over$40 billion. Some of that money would go to school districts and affluent communities. But there is research showing that universal programs have particular benefits for recipients who do need the support. Michelle Marcus is an economist at Vanderbilt University who studied the economic impact of the community eligibility provision. What's interesting here is that some of the poorest households who we really care about are in fact benefiting from expanding access to everyone in the classroom.

9:04According to her study, after the expansion, low-income families were able to spend less on groceries every month and they saw lower food insecurity. So this suggests that these households, even though they were previously eligible, there were some barriers to access that prevented them from taking up these benefits. And these are probably non-monetary barriers, things like social stigma. And we think those seem to be really important. Michelle says her research suggests that making free meals available to everyone took away those barriers. She is careful to point out, though, that because the community eligibility provision only applies to high-poverty schools, it's not clear what the economic impact would be if a school in a more affluent area offered universal free meals.

9:52OK, sounds like an opportunity for future economic research in those states that have free lunches. Yeah, time to sharpen some pencils, Darian.

10:02This episode was produced by Corey Bridges with engineering by James Willits. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Keegan Cannon is our show's editor and the Indicators are production of NPR.

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