Youngsters who get sick from COVID also miss out on school lunches
First Jill Carey and her children got sick. Then they got hungry.
When the family came down with COVID-19 in early December, Carey’s son and daughter had to isolate at their home in the Philadelphia area for two weeks. That meant missing school — and the reduced-price lunches the kids rely on.
“I felt like I was rationing,” said Carey, a 39-year-old single mother. “I have a loaf of bread. We’ve got to make the loaf of bread last all week.”
America’s low-income families, already burdened with surging food inflation and the pandemic’s lasting economic blow, are now facing a new set of challenges when it comes to feeding their kids. Intermittent, often unpredictable, interruptions to schooling can also mean losing access to the free and subsidized school meals that have long been a cornerstone of U.S. efforts to combat child hunger.
At the height of the January omicron wave, at least 7,462 U.S. public schools suspended in-person learning, according to the data company Burbio Inc. And throughout the school year, many students have been sent home to isolate for a week or more after coming down with the virus or after close contact with an infected peer or staff member — even when schools themselves remained open.
While many schools offered “grab and go” options for the free and subsidized meals, they can be incredibly hard for working parents to access. It typically means getting an adult to the school during a small window of time to pick up the meals. For a low-wage worker, that could involve having to take unpaid time off just to pick up lunch for their kid.
And if children are away from school quarantining because of illness, adult family members may also be sick.
“The problem is people can’t take off work to get to the school. That’s when the meals are available, and that has to do with the school schedule and cafeteria staff bagging the meal,” said Laurie Taylor-Mitchell, president of the Student Support Network of Baltimore County, which provides support for impoverished students in the Maryland county.
Hunger is once again on the rise in the U.S. after a period of temporary relief during the summer months.
The situation with school closures and quarantines is adding to the pile of hardships falling on low-income families amid the omicron wave and the withdrawal of federal programs like extended unemployment benefits. Food prices in January were up 7% from a year ago, the most since 1981.
And the Biden administration’s expanded child tax credit, which helped lift millions of families out of poverty, expired at the end of 2021.
Democrats’ hopes to extend the tax credit are dimming along with prospects for President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better economic package.
In early January, more than 10.4 million households with children didn’t have enough food in the prior seven days, according to a U.S. Census survey. That’s 700,000 more families than a month earlier and 1.2 million more than in October.
At Murphy’s Giving Market, a local food bank in Upper Darby, the number of families seeking food surged in early January as schools closed for COVID outbreaks, said Desiree La Marr-Murphy, the founder. Many parents didn’t know where to go for school meals, she said.
Though the Philadelphia school system posted information about temporary distribution centers on its website,
often families weren’t aware of the option.
“They would ask me how do they go about getting the meals during the school closures. I didn’t have any answers,” La Marr-Murphy said.
The meals distributed by Murphy’s Giving Market proved essential for single-mom Carey and her children. A work colleague brought some supplies from the food bank to her family. Her sister also shared some groceries. That helped to dent the blow from the skipped school meals. It was enough that her children “weren’t malnourished,” but she still had to tell them “no” when they were hungry for more, she said.
“It makes you feel bad,” Carey said. “It makes you feel bad as a parent.”
An average of 29.6 million children received free or reduced price lunches each school day in the 2019 federal fiscal year. About half of them got breakfast, too. And that’s not counting children like Carey’s, who receive low-cost meals from their Catholic schools rather than the federal program.
Earlier in the pandemic, school systems scrambled to maintain the food assistance as they shifted to virtual learn
ing. Many set up distribution centers where families could pick up days’ or even a week’s worth of meals. Some districts even sent out school buses stocked with meals to hand out at stops.
Congress funded a program to replace missed school meals with a benefit modeled on food stamps that families could use to purchase groceries. Now that disruptions have become more unpredictable, it’s harder for schools to keep up. Only 43% of school districts were offering or planning to offer meals to students in quarantine, according to a survey completed in November by the School Nutrition Association, a professional organization of school food service directors.
Schools are juggling meal service with staff shortages and the extra demands of health protocols.
“We are constantly reaching out to parents to cover every household in the school system,” said Larry Wade, director of school nutrition services for Chesapeake Public Schools in Virginia, where families dealing with disruptions can pick up five days’ worth of meals on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 3:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.
It’s a struggle to make sure all the meals needed get prepared in the midst of a labor shortage. In Chesapeake, Wade is short about 60 cafeteria staff and 25 lunchroom monitors district-wide. One high school cafeteria was preparing meals for 1,550 students with a staff of five.
“That was virtually unheard of before COVID,” Wade said. Meanwhile, the federal pandemic food benefits that bolstered many families in 2020 and part of 2021 haven’t been available to most of the country so far this school year. It’s logistically complicated for the state agencies that administer food stamps to monitor sporadic school closures to determine benefit payments, much less COVID-related absences for individual students.
Though the Biden administration renewed the program, just 13 states had a federally approved plan as of Feb. 8.
“A lot of kids are missing substantial school because of the quarantine and isolation protocols,” said Diane Schanzenbach, a Northwestern University social policy professor who studies child poverty. “These are the front lines of anti-hunger.”