In addition to its chip-winning basketball franchise and bodega cats, New York City is home to some of our country’s finest welfare programs. Millions of kids, including myself, grew up on them. Beyond the typical surprises city kids face when going rural — constellations, deep breaths of air, Republicans, et cetera — I was especially taken aback by New Hampshire’s school lunch program.
New Hampshire’s current school lunch program does the bare minimum. As mandated by the National School Lunch Program, a program launched in 1946 under the Truman administration, New Hampshire families at or below 130% of the federal poverty level qualify for free school lunch. That’s an income of $42,900 a year for a Granite State family of four. A family within 130 to 185% of the federal poverty level — a family of four making $42,901 a year, for example — qualifies for reduced-price school lunches at no more than 40 cents a lunch. The children of any family of four making $61,051 are left to starve.
I wish this piece could be a call for radical progress. It’s not — at most it’s an ode to the status quo ante bellum. The Trump administration’s cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have left working families on their back foot: By reducing the number of people eligible for SNAP and adding significantly more hoops for low-income families to jump through, poor students, who would have been automatically enrolled in the Free Lunch program by virtue of being on SNAP, aren’t getting the lunch they’re entitled to. The New Hampshire Department of Education is anticipating a 4.5% drop in the number of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch next year. That’s just shy of 2,000 students.
Schools receive an additional $2,400 for each student in the free and reduced-price lunch program to help cover the cost of educating children from low-income families. Because President Trump has made it harder for families to enroll in SNAP, New Hampshire school districts will see cuts to funds they depend on to operate school buses, pay teachers and stage school musicals.
Bipartisanship is important, but I draw the line at child hunger. Trump is bullying little kids out of their lunch money, and the state of New Hampshire’s failure to respond is plain complicity. New Hampshire is one of only six states that doesn’t use Medicaid direct certification — the single mechanism that would automatically catch kids losing SNAP who still qualify by income. Moreover, in May of this year, the state legislature failed to pass legislation that would’ve expanded eligibility for reduced-price lunch to families at or below 200% of the poverty line.
When we turn away from what New Hampshire is failing to do and towards what other states are accomplishing, we’re reminded that our reality need not be this grim.
In 2017, the New York City Department of Education announced “Free School Lunch For All.” The aptly titled program, a product of years of food-fighting in city hall, covered 200,000 additional students not previously enrolled in its means-tested predecessor. The results, even to a student previously enrolled in the program like myself, are shocking.
A study titled “Let Them Eat Lunch,” conducted by researchers Amy Ellen Schwartz and Michah Rothbart, found that, as schools slowly adopted free school meals, lunch participation rose 11 percentage points for non-poor students and 5.4 percentage points for poor students. The same study further noted that test scores increased 0.06 to 0.08 standard deviations for non-poor students and 0.03 standard deviations for poor students in math and ELA. Compared with other tactics administrators use to raise test scores, like modest class-size reductions, free school lunch is more effective and costs a fraction as much.
I have a distinct memory from my elementary school days, prior to the 2017 launch of Universal Free Meals in New York City. Every day, when lunch rolled around, I’d claim my spot in line, not too excited for the hodgepodge of spinach on the horizon, but not unhappy at the prospect of an unbranded chocolate pudding delicacy. The kids in line with me, I realize now, were also poor. I’d punch in my code at the PIN pad, fumbling about with the numbers I promised my mom I’d remember. Finding my way to the lunch tables, I’d see my friends with their packed lunches. Beyond a faint envy, I rarely thought much of it.
I remember the day the PIN pads went away. Friends with packed lunches would snag spots in line on Pizza Wednesday or if I returned with a chocolate pudding. I remember the collage of compostable trays dotting the tables looking nice — feeling nice.
I personally wasn’t bullied by my peers whilst on the means-tested program, but I have friends from other schools who were. The stigma was, and still is, there. Bullying and fighting decrease across all students in UFM schools, regardless of family income. Studies also indicate that students previously enrolled in the means-tested version reported feeling safer specifically in cafeteria spaces.
I digress: The stigma sucks, but these days it’s somehow higher on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than the magnitude of catastrophe we’re faced with — thousands of children won’t even have a free lunch to get bullied for. Stigma also isn’t why students deserve universally free school lunches. They’re entitled to an education — the strong education America has, can, and should provide — and anything preventing that is utterly unacceptable. Education is the silver bullet. And yet, education is nothing so long as our students are wondering where their next meal is coming from or why their parents are skipping meals. Our students are our future surgeons, astronauts, diplomats, presidents. I can’t even believe I’m measuring child hunger prevention in terms of utils to our economy, but out of desperation, to whom it may concern, I am.
Any comfort or confidence I find in knowing I’m fighting against something as unjust and vile as child hunger is rendered obsolete by the sheer fact that for every one of us there’s someone else out there trying to perpetuate it. If my time in our purple state has taught me anything, it’s that I must adjust my standard for normalcy. I refuse, however, to adjust my standard for human decency. New Hampshire students need lunch, and they need it now.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
