Feeding Students in Educational Programs Wisconsin

At nearly every Wisconsin public school, all students will be able to eat free meals this academic year, same as they did last year under a federally funded program responding to the pandemic.

But not in Waukesha, located approximately 20 miles from Milwaukee.

Administrators opted into the program last year but school board members intervened and hit the brakes this time around.

"As we get back to whatever you want to believe normal means, we have decisions to make," Joseph Como, president of the school board, said in a meeting. "I would say this is part of normalization."

Board member Karin Rajnicek said the free program made it easy for families to "become spoiled." Darren Clark, assistant superintendent for business services, said he feared there would be a "slow addiction" to the service.

Waukesha students from low-income families will still be able to apply for free or reduced-price meals under the traditional National School Lunch Program.

In addition, as was practice before the pandemic, young students in grades lower than high school who come to school without a packed lunch, money or an accepted lunch program application, may be given cheaper meals of cheese sandwiches, finance director Sheri Stack said. Their guardians will be charged for them.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's decision to extend the Seamless Summer Option during the pandemic to offer free meals year-round has allowed for more COVID-safe practices by eliminating the need to collect payments and allowing meals to be served more easily in classrooms or outside.

The decision also allowed students to be fed regardless of their ability to pay, qualify, convince their parents to fill out forms, or withstand stigma associated with qualifying.

Sherrie Tussler, executive director of Hunger Task Force, said the program is vital for ensuring access to food.

"When children are in your company and it's meal time, you feed them," Tussler said. "You don't sort them. This gives the district the opportunity to not sort children, to feed them all."

In an email to Stack, Debra Wollin from the state Department of Public Instruction's school nutrition team said she "highly recommended" the district reconsider, noting the child hunger rate in Waukesha County increased from 9% in 2019 to 13% in 2020.

"Many families who would not normally qualify for free or reduced-price meals may still need assistance for financial hardships that they have experienced this past year," Wollin said in the email.

Snagging snacks from the health room

Waukesha School Board Treasurer Patrick McCaffery said in a meeting he had not been aware that all school meals were being provided for free. He said he was confident that students who couldn't afford meals would be able to qualify under the traditional program.

"Our administrative team has never let a large amount of kids fall between the cracks and it's not going to happen next year," McCaffery said. "I think anyone that's concerned about it, their concerns are not needed."

Jess Huinker, an executive assistant for the district, said in the meeting that she has noticed in previous years that some students do go without meals because they don't qualify or because their parents haven't turned in applications.

"We have seen kids that don't eat," she said. "They constantly go to the health room to get whatever snacks the health room might provide."

Stack also noted that under the traditional system, some students who qualify for free breakfast may not feel comfortable accepting it because they will stick out as being from a low-income family.

"There does seem to be some stigma to breakfast being for those students," she said.

In a press release, district officials said the free breakfast program, which handed each student a meal each morning, led to significant food waste. They also said demand for meals over the summer had declined.

Another concern with a universally free program, they noted, was that families would not need to fill out forms sharing information about their income. Thus, the district would not have this information on file to quickly determine eligibility for free meals if the universal program came to an end. Additionally, these forms are used to estimate the percentage of students in poverty, which determines the amount of funding received for various programs.

However, as this is an issue faced by districts across the country, federal and state officials have shared guidance about alternate ways to calculate the needed rates.

District officials also noted their food service program will lose money as a result of leaving the universally federally funded program, which reimburses districts at higher rates than the traditional program.

"I would suggest this is either an uninformed or under-informed decision on the part of the school board," Tussler said. "And it should be revisited quickly, because it's going to result in a loss of substantial revenue for the school system, and that revenue could be used to create additional programming or improve the quality of the food on the plate."

Contact Rory Linnane at rory.linnane@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @RoryLinnane.

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Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2021/08/28/waukesha-students-there-really-no-such-thing-free-lunch/5622614001/

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