The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Not all eligible Connecticut children are receiving coronavirus food aid
WASHINGTON — This week, 55,200 families in Connecticut enrolled in the food stamp program received extra money to compensate for children in those households who received free and reduced-price meals in their schools before the pandemic closed school houses in midMarch.
But tens of thousands of other families that relied on those school meals to keep their children fed will have to wait a while longer to benefit from part of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act passed by Congress more than two months ago.
The state Department of Social Services says the 265,631 public school and 1,748 private school students who receive free or reduced school lunches in the state are eligible for a one time payment of $364.80 per child to purchase food.
But many of those children who qualify for the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) program have not yet received help partly because they live in about 80,000 households that are were not previously enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the official name for food stamps.
Those households don’t have the EBT cards that allow food stamp recipients to buy groceries at supermarkets and other places. To be able to access that food aid, those households must receive EBT cards from the state.
The process to set up the Pandemic-EBT program in Connecticut has also been impacted by a “myriad” of “planning and technological factors involved in delivering the benefits,” the Department of Social Services said.
The department had to coordinate with and obtain information from the state Department of Education, which in turn had to seek information about children who received free and reduced-price meals from each individual school district.
“We appreciate the phenomenal job by the Department of Education
and participating school districts in getting us up-to-date information about eligible children,” said Dan Giacomi, SNAP program manager for DSS. “We created this new process, tested it, and are running it in what we believe is a timely manner under the circumstances, which included getting an amendment with additional funding from USDA because of the changing date of school closure.”
Yet Robin Lamott Sparks, executive director of End Hunger Connecticut!, said the pandemic has shown a weakness in the way Connecticut agencies communicate and share information with each other.
“What this has really done is show that social service sectors have been operating in silos,” she said, and that more efforts should be made to “get systems talking to each other.”
“But that’s not something that can happen overnight,” Lamott Sparks said.