Schools, families feel the pinch after end of federal free meal program
Ali Rogin:
Joining me now is Crystal FitzSimons from the Food Research and Action Center, she leads the Center's work on nutrition programs that serve school aged children.
Crystal, thank you so much for joining us. When this program ended, many school districts switched back to having kids apply to receive reduced or free school lunches. What were some of the challenges in implementing those changes?
Crystal Fitzsimons, Food Research & Action Center: Yeah, so after a couple of years of schools being able to offer free meals to all students, schools had to go back to collecting school meal applications and individually qualifying kids for free or reduced-price school meals. So what we saw was that a lot of kids were falling through the cracks. A lot of families didn't know they had to fill out school meal applications. And the other challenge really is that the threshold to receive free school meals is too low. So for like a family of three, you would have to earn just under $30,000 a year in order to qualify for free school meals. So we actually heard from a lot of school districts that families were applying for free school meals, and they weren't meeting the cutoff.
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