School meal programs lose millions of dollars
“Nothing goes to waste. Whatever the kids don’t eat, my husband and I eat it.” Amanda Antey Teacher receiving meals for her children Feeding hungry children creates budget dilemma
The line of cars usually begins to form well before 11 a.m. outside Sharon Elementary school in Newburgh, Indiana, a town of less than 4,000 people along the Ohio River. Stella Antey, an 8-year-old secondgrader, has sat in one of those cars with her older sister, younger brother and parents every weekday for the past two months. The wait for cafeteria workers to hand them free lunches and breakfasts for the next day has often been the highlight of their mornings since schools closed in March. “My favorite is the breakfast,” she says. “I like the cereal and milk.” Her mother, high school civics and dance teacher Amanda Antey, enjoys the break the trips give her children from the sometimes restrictive learnfrom-home routine. Still, the free meals are far from a luxury. Antey and her drama teacher husband, Eric, still receive pay from Warrick County but can no longer teach the after-school dance and theater classes that provided extra income for their young family of five. Antey says that loss, along with rising food prices during the pandemic, makes the free school meals for their three children crucial. “Nothing goes to waste,” Amanda Antey says. “Whatever the kids don’t eat, my husband and I eat it.” Necessity – both to prevent students from going hungry and to keep the people feeding them safe – is what drives Shenae Rowe through the long days and weekends since she joined hundreds of school nutrition directors across the country who, in a matter of days, transformed their school meal operations into emergency feeding programs. The efforts come at a price. In the past 10 weeks alone, school districts and nonprofit organizations tasked with feeding children during the pandemic have lost at least $1 billion. The losses climb with every lunch and breakfast workers serve and could force programs across the county to go into debt or dip into money dedicated to teachers and classrooms to stay afloat. Challenges have come from all sides. Although nearly half of America’s schoolchildren were on free or reduced lunch before the pandemic, school shutdowns eliminated the revenue that came from other children whose families paid for the meals. At the same time, costs have soared. Protective equipment for employees, extra cleaning measures, steps to ensure social distancing in food prep, hazard pay in some cases – they all cost more. It’s also more expensive to package meals that can be taken home or to buy individually wrapped foods that are more portable and easier to serve from a social distance than the soups and family-style meals cafeteria workers used to ladle out one at a time to long lines of children. All told, spending for many feeding programs has outstripped federal reimbursements for the emergency meals. The House’s most recent relief bill allocated $3 billion for child nutrition programs from now through September 2021, but the bill will face heavy challenges in the Senate, and school food coordinators say they’re unclear on how much of that money will go to individual districts even if it passes. Still in emergency mode, school nutrition directors like Rowe, whose program has lost $500,000 since March, say they’re too overwhelmed to even begin thinking about what they’ll do