Lansing nutrition organization joins statewide fight for free school meals

Members of Lansing Lunchbox, a local nutrition program that feeds children who don’t have access to safe and reliable food sources, are calling for New York state officials to create a fund in the 2025 state budget that would ensure that healthy school breakfasts and lunches be available to all children in school districts across the state.

The organization is a member of a coalition of education agencies and school districts across the state under the name Healthy School Meals For All New York, whose members plan to advocate for universal free breakfast and lunch at New York schools.

Susan Tabrizi, a member of Lansing Lunchbox who has in years past gone to Albany to advocate for free meals in schools, said that despite recent advances being made by state and federal officials with increased funding and lowering of eligibility thresholds, hundreds of thousands of children still go hungry during the school day. 

“There are still many kids, something like 320,000 across 659 schools in New York, approximately, who don’t have access to free breakfast and lunch,” Tabrizi said, noting that the state has to catch up to states like California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, Vermont, Michigan and Massachusetts, all of which have already passed measures to secure free meals for all students. 

New York’s 2024 budget included about $134 million in funding for free school meals, after a similar program, federally mandated due to the COVID-19 epidemic, fizzled out in June, 2022. Around 700,000 students in the state lost access to free breakfast and lunch when the federal government declined to fund the program in summer of 2022.

Tabrizi and other advocates with Healthy School Meals For All want that funding to be secured permanently and renewed every year. She said there is a real need for the availability of free meals, and noted that more and more students have been eating at schools in Lansing since the district secured a free meals plan for the 2023-2024 school year.

Lansing Central School District schools started offering free meals to all of its students starting last November. The district was able to gain access to free meals through its participation in the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) of the National School Lunch Program. 

CEP is a federal program that allows low-income areas to serve free meals to all students, regardless of their family’s income, without having to collect personal income information. The threshold percentage of students in need that a district must host in order to receive free meals through CEP is 25% of the total student body.

Because school districts depend on staying below that eligibility threshold to be able to provide free meals through CEP, Tabrizi said that state leaders must guarantee the program will work for all districts in the state.

“In a school like Lansing, we’re talking about how a slight change in the yearly earnings of families, or having new families moving into the district could make Lansing not qualify for CEP,” Tabrizi said. “That would put a lot of kids out. We’ve seen the number of kids participating in lunch and breakfast go up since November. So, it just goes to show you how families are benefiting, kids are benefiting.”

Addressing hunger and food insecurity in schools would bring tangible benefits to the community, Tabrizi said. Among other things, doing so could help with educational outcomes, she noted.

“Say I haven’t had anything to eat or not enough to eat, or what I had to eat was just sugar and I’m about to crash,” Tabrizi said. “I can’t even think, let alone try to learn how to read or do math.” 

Healthy School Meals For All estimated that a fund that would secure free meals in all New York schools would also be financially beneficial to parents. For instance, the coalition wrote in a press release that the move could save families an estimated $150 per child per month in grocery costs.

To get involved with Lansing Lunchbox and learn about potential opportunities to support their cause, visit  https://www.lansinglunchbox.org/?fbclid=IwAR3CLOF2GVppWwrM7xaO9r_VJg7VU1fOfGVNmyQj7qPtD3yLhmLKNUgjXz4

Lansing at Large appears every week in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@vizellamedia.com. Contact Eddie Velazquez at edvel37@gmail.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @ezvelazquez.

In brief:

The Lansing Community Library will host an after-school expedition for fifth and sixth graders on Feb. 27. The title of the expedition is illuminated letters. Carol Hockett, from the Johnson Museum of Art, will be on hand from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. at the library. For this month’s activity, participants will help children design and create illuminated letters, which are typically decorated with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations.