STATE DOLES OUT BILLIONS TO FEED YOUTHS
EBT cards mailed to students’ families, but much remains unspent
San Diego parent Alyson Gore was surprised to recently find a plain white envelope addressed to her second-grade son in her pile of mail.
“He never gets mail,” said Gore, whose son attends Gage Elementary in the Lake Murray neighborhood. “I thought, ‘Who’s sending my son an application for a credit card?’ ”
Inside the envelope was an EBT card, an electronic benefits transfer card that she could use like a debit card to buy more than $1,100 in food.
Gore was shocked, she said, because she had never applied for or qualified for food assistance, and she and her husband didn’t need the money.
“We’re not struggling; we’re fortunate to be able to make ends meet,” Gore said.
Gore’s son is one of some nearly 5 million California children who recently received pandemic EBT benefits in the mail.
From July through December, the state distributed $4.3 billion in federal funds for 4 million children who would have had access to free meals at school but did not because of school closures last school year. About 730,000 children under age 6 also qualified.
The EBT funds can be used to buy food at most grocery stores, farmers markets and online retailers such as Amazon.
The $4.3 billion is the second payout of pandemic EBT benefits, covering when schools were closed for the 2020-21 school year. An initial round of benefits totaling $1.3 billion was distributed earlier to 4.4 million children for the period of March through June 2020.
The EBT cards have confused some parents who received them despite doing well financially. Some said they’ve never qualified for or received government food benefits before.
“I told them, ‘Don’t touch them; don’t use them,’ because I don’t want to get screwed up in taxes or something,” said Shelley Karp, of her two children who attend Gage. “I shouldn’t be getting free lunch, so why are they sending this?”
Even though some families might not need it, advocates say the funding for school meals is important for many other families who do.“Pandemic EBT has been a really important lifeline for a lot of families throughout the pandemic,” said Lisa Davis, senior vice president of the organization No Kid Hungry.
Public schools did provide millions of free meals during the school closures, usually available for pickup. However, many families were unable to pick up those meals because of a lack of transportation or because distribution was during business hours, when most parents were working.
“They left big gaps despite really heroic efforts,” Davis said of schools’ meal distribution. “That’s where pandemic EBT came in.”
Under the program, families receive $123 in pandemic benefits per child per month that their school was closed. They receive $68 per month that their school was open for hybrid learning, which involved learning inperson part of the time and remotely part of the time.
California is giving pandemic EBT benefits not only to students who individually qualify for free or reducedprice meals — a measure of poverty used in schools — but also to all students who attend the so-called Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, schools, regardless of income.
CEP schools have so many students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals that they receive enough federal funding to
provide free meals to all their students, including those who don’t personally qualify for free meals.
The state is sending pandemic EBT money to all students at CEP schools to compensate for the free meals the schools did not provide during the closures.
The Gores’ and Karps’ children attend Gage, a CEP school.
But many families have not yet taken advantage of the EBT money, state officials said.
About half of the EBT benefits, $2 billion, has not yet been spent, according to the state Department of Social Services, which oversees distribution of the benefits, and about $139 million of the first distribution remains unspent.
Any unspent funds will be returned to the federal government, which pays for the pandemic EBT program, the department said.
For families, unused EBT benefits will expire one year after being mailed or one year after the most recent purchase on the EBT card.
If a family does not need to use the benefits, the department suggests on its website that families destroy the unspent EBT cards.
Gore came up with a different solution.
She went to Costco and loaded up two carts with $1,100 worth of peanut butter, canned chicken, canned vegetables, infant formula, rice and beans. Then she dropped those items off at Gage’s food drive and at the San Diego Food Bank.
Gore said she feels conflicted about the EBT money. On the one hand, the mass distribution could be helping families who didn’t qualify for food aid in the past but need it now during the pandemic, she said.
On the other hand, she wonders if there should be more oversight in deciding who gets the EBT money. For example, she said, she knows of a family that didn’t appear to qualify for food assistance and used the EBT money to buy food for a holiday party.
“I appreciate that the state was trying to do something to ensure that everyone had access to food, but at the same time, I wish there had been a little more oversight in determining who actually needed that,” Gore said.
Families who throw away or lose their EBT card and want to retrieve their unspent benefits can call the state’s helpline for a replacement card at (877) 328-9677.