Summary: The Affordability Of School Lunch

School Lunch Affordability in Lincoln Problem Description: Many families in the United States struggle to afford school lunches for their children. According to the Education Data Initiative, children who can’t afford proper meals, and therefore lack access to food, are considered food insecure. School lunch debt statistics collected by the Education Data Initiative indicate that 30.4 million students can’t afford their school meals. The national public school meal debt is $262 million a year. Here in Nebraska, the school meal debt is $14,876,022 (Hanson, 2024). As stated by the poverty guidelines for 2024, families of 5 that make less than $36,580 a year are considered to be in poverty (Poverty Guidelines, 2024). An article from The Guardian

Students within 185% are eligible for reduced-price meals. Every other student pays full price (Nowell, 2023). A significant issue with this system is that even families who don’t qualify for free or reduced lunch can struggle to afford them. According to the Education Data Initiative, many of the children who have school lunch debt are from families that earn too much to qualify for free or reduced lunch but aren’t able to afford traditional-priced meals with their annual income (Hanson, 2024). This statement shows the significance of being unable to pay for school lunches by displaying that it isn’t just lower-income families that struggle to pay for school meals. Even if students qualify to receive free or reduced meals, they might feel embarrassed to utilize those programs because of the stigma around it, for example, appearing poor to their peers. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, the USDA was able to provide free meals to all public-school students. However, that practice ended after the pandemic. According to an article from AP News, now only 8 states have free school meals for all students (Karnowski & Bryan,

Universal Free Meals (UFM) can increase test scores and school lunch participation for both poor and non-poor students. School lunch participation increases academic performance in both math and English language arts. “UFM increases test scores by 0.08 standard deviations in math and 0.07 standard deviations in ELA” (Schwartz, A. E., & Rothbart, M. W. 2020). New York City let all students eat breakfast for free in 2003 but increased the price of school lunches for the students without free or reduced lunches. Low participation during school meals can be caused by many factors. “First, students who do not have a lot of money can be more sensitive to school breakfast than school lunch” (Leos-Urbel, J., Schwartz, A. E., Weinstein, M., & Corcoran, S. 2013). Some families are not able to pay for both meals, especially if they have multiple children, even with reduced meal prices. Second, children may be hesitant to participate because they view school meals as being ‘just for poor kids’. Third, school meals are not super appealing because of the rules to make them with high nutritional standards and their low quality because they feed lots of children in short amounts of time. Some schools have fast food restaurants and vending machines available for lunch, and that can rival healthy school meal options. Lastly, breakfast is normally served before classes start, so it requires students