School nutrition officials across Vermont are urging lawmakers to permanently fund a universal free meals program that’s set to expire at the end of the school year. But Gov. Phil Scott says he doesn’t want to use limited taxpayer resources to buy free breakfast and lunch for kids from families that can afford to pay.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020, the federal government instituted a nationwide universal free school meals program as part of its food security response.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture ended that program after the 2021-2022 school year, but Vermont lawmakers allocated $29 million in last year’s budget to keep universal meals alive for one more year. With that funding set to expire in June, school nutrition directors are now calling on the Legislature to make universal meals permanent.
Karyl Kent, school nutrition director at the Lamoille North Supervisory Union, told lawmakers this week that program has been transformational.
“You have changed a system, and you have changed a culture in the schools in Vermont,” Kent said. "You have changed the culture of school nutrition in the state of Vermont, and you are setting a model for schools across the country.”
“In terms of the program itself and whether it makes sense, completely, uniformly, consistently it’s been a good thing for Vermont students, for Vermont families and … to farmers as well."Shaftsbury Rep. David Durfee
State legislatures in California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada have also chosen to use state funds to back fill federal money that paid for meals during the height of the pandemic.
Vermont’s Republican governor, however, said this week that it’s time to let the universal program go. While government should absolutely foot the school meal bill for families that can’t afford to pay it, he said taxes paid by working-class Vermonters shouldn’t be used to subsidize the food bills of wealthy residents.
“A universal program would, in fact, burden those we are trying to help to help those who are affluent enough to pay for it,” Scott said. “So I would prefer that we take care of those who can’t afford it on their own and help them out. But those who can afford it should be able to provide for their families.”
The problem with that approach, according to Anoreorton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, is that thousands of needy families in Vermont don’t qualify for federal free and reduced-price meal programs.
Once a family of four hits $36,100 a year in household income, their kids are no longer eligible for free lunch. At about $51,000 a year, they stop getting the reduced-price rate.
Analysts at the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office, meanwhile, say that in order for a family four to meet its basic needs in Vermont, it needs a household income of $70,000 a year.
“So there’s about 30% to 40% of the students attending school in Vermont right now who fall into that gap, whose families are not actually fully able to meet their basic needs,” Horton said. “And the easiest thing to cut there is the food budget, but they also can’t afford school meals, and they’ll never qualify for them under the federal guidelines.”
School nutrition staff at schools in Vermont say they’ve seen other benefits to the universal meals program as well. Kent said the elimination of the “stigma” that low-income kids experience when they get their school meals is perhaps the most important.
Class divides used to manifest clearly in the cafeteria, Kent said, based on what kids had to do to get their meals, or what meals kids happen to be eating.
Doug Davis, a former school nutrition director at the Burlington School District, said universal free meals have also “streamlined the business of feeding children.”
Administering the free and reduced-price meals program, he said, added enormous bureaucracy to the school food system. Unburdened by the accounting requirements that accompany federal food nutrition programs, he said, cafeteria staff now have time to cook food from scratch and test recipes.
“My whole career in child nutrition, I believed this was the best slam-dunk investment we could make in our kids’ education.”Harley Sterling, president of the School Nutrition Association of Vermont
Schools are also buying more food from local producers, thanks to a state-level incentive that provides financial bonuses to schools who allocate at least 15% of overall food costs to products sourced in Vermont.
“My whole career in child nutrition, I believed this was the best slam-dunk investment we could make in our kids’ education,” said Harley Sterling, president of the School Nutrition Association of Vermont, and school nutrition director at Windham Northeast Supervisory Union. “Now that we’ve seen universal school meals in action for the last three years, I don’t just believe it, I know it.”
Vergennes Rep. Diane Lanpher, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said it’s too early to say whether her committee will find room for universal school meals in the House’s budget proposal.
Go deeper: Agency of Education report on outcome of universal meals program so far.
But the chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resiliency and Forestry, which has jurisdiction over the school meals policy, said his committee will almost certainly urge appropriations to fund the request.
“In terms of the program itself and whether it makes sense, completely, uniformly, consistently it’s been a good thing for Vermont students, for Vermont families and … to farmers as well,’ said Rep. David Durfee, a Democrat from Shaftsbury.
As for the governor’s concerns, Durfee said the public education system generally pays for everything a kid needs for school, regardless of how much their parents make.
“We don’t ask certain families to pay for textbooks or instruction or anything else we’re providing as part of public education,” he said. “And the benefits spread more broadly than to those families that would otherwise be paying.”
Brattleboro Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, chair of the House Committee on Ways and Means, said that if lawmakers do decide to fund universal free meals, then the money should come out of the education fund.
Adding new costs to the fund that pays for public schools, however, would result in an increase in property taxes – an outcome Kornheiser hopes to avoid.
“My hope is that if we do decide to go forward with this as a body that we are able to find another revenue source for the education fund in order to make up the difference, so it doesn’t affect … property tax rates,” she said.
Kornheiser said her committee hasn’t coalesced around a revenue mechanism yet. She did note that her committee recently got a presentation on all the products that are currently exempt from sales taxes.
“Coincidentally,” she said, eliminating those exemptions would raise about the $29 million a year Vermont would need to fund universal meals.
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