Child Nutrition Heads for Reauthorization
By Heidi Taylor
WASHINGTON—Today is sloppy joe day! But that’s not all that kids at North Shore schools will eat. They’ll also get corn, an apple and milk with lunch, and if they participate in the breakfast program, French toast sticks with syrup, fruit juice and some more milk–all in accordance with national nutrition guidelines set under the federal Child Nutrition Act of 1966 that authorizes such school meal programs.
The act comes up for reauthorization in Congress this year, and with the struggling economy and some new proposals by the Bush administration, many legislators and schools across the country are worried that needy children will go hungry. Amid concern that ineligible children are participating in the free and reduced-price meal programs that are aimed at children from low-income families, the administration has proposed increased income documentation requirements and more stringent audits to verify eligibility.
“It is serious business,” Rep. John Tierney, D-Salem, said Thursday in a phone interview, adding that if the country is serious about its desire to see children perform well in school, then it must also make it a priority to see them fed well. Any proposals to alter the current system must be thoroughly tested on a representative group of schools to ensure that there are no unintended consequences, he said.
ws Congress originally enacted the nutrition legislation to safeguard the health and well-being of children by giving states grants and other aid so that schools would be able to meet the nutritional needs of their students. Each school day, over 28 million children receive federally funded school meals, according to Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee.
However, Harkin said at a hearing Tuesday, far too many children who need school meals are not getting them. And the documentation and audit proposals could affect low-income children, and mean that even more of them will go underfed, Democrats say.
The nutrition law requires that free or reduced-price meals be offered to children from families with incomes that don’t exceed130 to 185 percent of the federal poverty level. Under this year’s Health and Human Services Department’s poverty guidelines, that means that a child from a family of four is eligible for free meals if the family income is below about $24,000. For reducedprice meal, a child is eligible if the family income is below about $34,000.
According to Janice Harkins, director of food services for Peabody Public Schools, that means that of the approximately 7,000 children enrolled in the district, about 1,200 qualify for free or reduced-price meals. Of those, she says, 400 to 500 come from families who have already qualified for welfare programs like Food Stamps or Medicaid and so automatically qualified under the direct certification program that Harkins has implemented.
And although Harkins says that she’s never seen any proof of someone trying to beat the system to get free or reduced-price meals they don’t qualify for, the Bush administration has increasingly expressed concern in that ineligible children are participating in those programs. The administration has made some preliminary proposals to combat this problem, such as increasing the required documentation–families’ income statements and application materials– and conducting more stringent audits of participants through the year.
According to Gloucester Public Schools food service director Mark Lidano, families in Massachusetts must fill out applications, and, if qualified, the children are enrolled in either the free or reduced-price program. At one point in the year, Lidano said, 3 percent of participants are audited, but schools already are having a difficult time getting just that 3 percent to prove they qualify. And requiring more from people who are not quick to respond or just unwilling doesn’t seem like a solution to the problem, he said.
Referring to past studies which he said showed that increased documentation requirements caused eligible low-income children to drop from the meal programs, Tierney said that the proposals have the possibility of creating very adverse effects. “There is a stigma here,” he said, adding that some families may opt out of the program rather than be forced to provide their income statements. Harkins agreed, saying that families would probably be more reluctant to apply. And that could mean that children go hungry, they both said.
“Ongoing studies confirm that a hungry child cannot learn effectively,” Gaye Lynn MacDonald, president of the American School Food Service Association, said at the hearing, adding that a hungry child is distracted from learning and more likely to experience discipline and health problems. “It is critically important that child nutrition programs be effectively extended and easily accessible to all children who are eligible.”
Democrats say the new proposals would not necessarily solve the problem, but instead would have a negative impact on hungry children. In past studies in which pilot programs tested increased documentation requirements, Tierney and several other Democrats say, eligible children were impeded from receiving benefits. In fact, they say, when documentation was required at the beginning of the year, five eligible children were deterred from enrolling for every ineligible child deterred.
“Not enough has changed in the school meal programs since these studies to suggest that such approaches would not similarly cause substantial numbers of eligible children to lose benefits today,” Tierney and other Democrats said in a letter to Mitch Daniels, director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-MA, released similar information this week indicating that national school lunch studies have found that three-quarters of families that did not respond or were unable to respond to requests for documentation because of literacy, language or other problems would actually have been found eligible for the meal program.
Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that in most programs that limit benefits to families based on certain income levels, errors in which ineligible people benefit occur. “The school lunch program is no exception to this phenomenon,” he said at the hearing, adding that it is a problem that needs to be dealt with, albeit carefully.
Tierney stressed the need for more studies on the problem because, he said, “as a society, we need children to be well fed and ready to learn.”
Published in The Newburyport Daily News, The Gloucester Daily News, and The Salem News in Massachusetts.
