Families struggle after loss of free meal waivers

This spring, almost every student at the Trumansburg Central School District (TCSD) was getting free breakfast and lunch thanks to pandemic-era federal waivers that made school lunch free for all students. However, when Congress allowed the waivers to expire in June, parents had to pay for meals again, and the once-bustling cafeterias emptied out, according to Rose Beardsley, the director of nutrition at TCSD.

“One of the last things any of us in any school district would want to do is tell a child that they cannot have food due to money,” Beardsley said. “It’s been a challenge since we started back in September. … Last year, every single kid was getting breakfast and lunch. This year, less than half of our enrollment is getting food.”

When the pandemic began, Congress passed a slew of different waivers for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to expand food access at public schools (tinyurl.com/2o8hrbkb). One of these waivers was making breakfast and lunch free for all students. It expired June 30.

By the time the free lunch waiver expired, Dee Stevenson had gotten used to sending her two children to school every day without having to worry about the money in their school lunch accounts. Before the pandemic, Stevenson could afford to buy her kids a few meals a week at school. However, when the free lunch waiver expired and charges for school lunches returned, it deepened Stevenson’s economic pain, as inflation was already a struggle for her.

“I was a little sad,” Stevenson said. “It just happened to coincide with this insane inflation that we’re all struggling with. Paying for lunch two years ago is not the same as paying for lunch now.”

Not all families have to pay for school lunch (fns.usda.gov/cn/fr-021622). According to data from the Food Bank of the Southern Tier, 37% of TCSD students are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch. However, when a parent cannot afford school lunch, students either cannot eat or are forced into school lunch debt. Each year, American families have $262 million of school lunch debt, averaging about $170.13 per student (educationdata.org/school-lunch-debt).

On the state level, efforts to improve New York’s school lunch system are ongoing. In 2021, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed A06527 (tinyurl.com/2qeq4v3e), a law that made it illegal for the state to sue parents over school lunch debt. That law was written and sponsored by Anna Kelles, who represents Tompkins County in the New York State Assembly.

In a statement, Kelles said she and other colleagues in Albany wrote a letter to current Gov. Kathy Hochul to include universal school meals in her upcoming proposal for the 2023-24 budget.

“When food insecurity was magnified for families across New York during the COVID-19 pandemic, the USDA’s free school lunch program provided critical relief,” Kelles said in a statement. “Ending hunger in schools is a key step towards equity and allows all children to focus their energy where it should be, on their education.”

On the national level, attempts to revive the free school lunch program since June have been nonexistent. In a statement, Marc Molinaro, representative-elect for New York’s 19th Congressional District (which includes Tompkins County), said he will support childhood nutrition programs.

“At certain points in my childhood, my family relied on food stamps and free lunches at school,” Molinaro said in a statement. “These experiences moved me to become a lifelong advocate for tackling childhood hunger. In Congress, I want to build on this work and will support programs that ensure students in need are fed and have the resources they need to succeed.”

Molinaro did not say if he supported the free school lunch waivers or if he would support reviving them. Joe Sempolinski, Trumansburg’s current Congressional representative, did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to increasing access and decreasing costs, the school lunch waivers cut through the web of red tape that makes many nutrition programs hard to navigate. Grace Parker Zielinski is the coordinator for Cornell’s Childhood Nutrition Collaborative, which aims to end child poverty in Tompkins County by hosting free meals.

“Not only did [free school lunch] take pressure off families in the moment, but it did away with all of the bureaucratic processes and barriers,” Parker Ziegler said. “When they put those barriers back in place, all of a sudden we were really aware of the contrast. … We at [Cornell Cooperative Extension] and our partner organizations were scrambling to let people know what was available immediately.”

Having to go back to paying for meals or packing meals from home added stress to Beardsley’s job as a parent. Her son, a 14-year-old with a big appetite, often asks for extra protein on his lunch tray at the high school cafeteria. However, since extra protein adds an additional charge to his lunch account, Beardsley has had to start crunching numbers to see if packing lunch from home is cheaper.

“[The waivers] really lifted the burden of me having to make arrangements around what days my kids could buy lunch,” Beardsley said. “By having it be free, I was able to stop thinking about that part, and because things were stressful at that time, it was one less stressor on my plate.”

Beardsley said that during the height of the pandemic, the waivers allowed TCSD’s bus drivers to drop off meals directly to Trumansburg’s children. Now that the waivers are gone, Beardsley is asking herself how many students at school are still able to eat.

“Why is this even a conversation?” Beardsley said. “The question should be, ‘Why are we even charging people for school lunch?’ It really should be in the forefront of every American’s mind right now. The most important thing in our country is our youth.”

Trumansburg Connection appears every Wednesday in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@VizellaMedia.com.