Another thing to be insecure about at School?

30 Million. Roughly 10 percent of the US population. That’s the number of students eating lunches at 100,000 school and institutions in the country every day. This equates to roughly 4.9 billion lunches served annually in the National School Lunch Program and with it comes an enormous lunch bill carried by students, their families and the US tax payer. In this bill lies a growing area of food insecurity - a growing burden of debt.

As they say there is no such thing as free lunch. Someone has to pay for it. For a large majority of students, this someone is the USDA through the Federal School Lunch Program. This program provides free lunch to 20 million students alone – roughly one third of all school lunches. But for the others, students receiving reduced price lunch and those paying full price, the lunch debt continues to bloom and thanks to a proposed Trump administration regulation, that number could be ripe for increase with more children caught between an empty lunch account and a hungry stomach.

At the heart of this issue is a rule change to “categorical eligibility” and its relation to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The free and reduced lunch eligibility chain works something like this. First, categorical eligibility rules allow states to automatically enroll individuals and families in SNAP benefits if they have already applied to another low-income benefit such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Next, schools look at a child’s SNAP eligibility as a certification for free or reduced school lunches removing the need for an additional application at the school level. Chronologically simplified the process is: apply to TANF, automatically become enrolled in SNAP, automatically become enrolled in free and reduced lunch programs. Removing the categorical eligibility adds unnecessary and bureaucratic steps back into this process at the detriment of a child in the lunch line.

Limiting ease of access to this essential program that covers of two thirds of students is a step in the wrong direction and adds unnecessary complexity to a program while only compounding the issue of food scarcity within our Nation’s youth.

What can you do? Get involved by sending a comment to regulations.gov.