The House passed a bill on Thursday, June 23, to extend food assistance measures for kids, drawing praise from advocates who said the legislation would help millions of children get access to meals as inflation makes it increasingly tough for many parents to make ends meet in their respective households.
The bill passed the House in a 376-42 vote and is now awaiting a vote in the Senate, according to NPR. The bipartisan legislation would spare dozens of child nutrition waivers that Congress provided the Agriculture Department the authority to issue. The pandemic-era waivers had been set to expire this coming Thursday, June 30.
However, the new bill - Keep Kids Fed Act- would not extend the most groundbreaking of the waivers provided by the federal government, one that made school lunches and breakfasts free to all students regardless of their families' incomes.
Bill allows summer meal program providers more flexibility
Anti-hunger advocates are still expressing relief that an agreement has been reached. The legislation would allow summer meal program providers to operate with more flexibility and help schools in the coming academic year as they continue to cope with labor shortages and supply chain interruptions.
Lisa Davis, the senior vice president of the No Kid Hungry campaign at Share Our Strength, a nonprofit organization working to end hunger and poverty, said, "Even though this bill doesn't have everything we had hoped and dreamed, it still has a lot. The most important thing is they are providing relief to those families that are on the edge."
Crystal FitzSimons, the director of school and out-of-school time programs at the anti-hunger organization Food Research and Action Center, echoed that sentiment, telling NBC News that it was exciting to have a bipartisan compromise on child nutrition programs as it should be a bipartisan issue.
Poor children need help with their meals
Kids in families with incomes below 130 percent of the federal poverty level were eligible for free school meals before March 2020.
Children in families whose incomes were 130 percent to 185 percent of the poverty level were eligible for reduced-price meals through the Agriculture Department's National School Lunch Program.
The new legislation would eliminate reduced-price meals, allowing those eligible kids to get free meals rather than pay 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch. According to Diane Pratt-Heavner, the spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, a trade organization representing more than 50,000 school nutrition employees, advocates have pushed for that in the past.
She explained why that is a huge deal, saying, "Although 40 cents for lunch might not sound like a lot, if you have three kids and you're trying to get them fed five days a week, that can really add up."
She added that a family of four would have had to have earned $34,450 or less to be eligible for free meals or $49,025 or less to have been eligible for reduced-price meals for the 2021-22 school year.
