A story caught my eye this morning: a Missouri fifth-grader raised $7,300 to pay the school meal debts of his peers.
This time of year, the media eagerly devours these heartwarming stories. Citizens — some as young as elementary school, apparently — fundraise to pay for students’ unpaid meal tickets while ignoring that the entire concept of school meal debt means that the state has failed children’s most basic essential need. You can’t function in life if you can’t eat.
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As Jess Piper says: it is a systemic failure of a state to not feed kids.
Piper points out that the state of Missouri budgets law makers’ meals through their per diem, a fancy latin phrase that refers to a daily allowance. State representatives in Missouri get $121 per day and state senators get $125.
It’s reasonable to expect law makers to get to eat while they do their jobs.
It’s even more reasonable to expect children to.
During the pandemic, the USDA provided free meals to all school-age children, but that program had an expiration date. Several blue states found ways to expand the program or make free and reduced meals more accessible. However, in many GOP-controlled states access to food became even more restrictive than before the pandemic. In Missouri, 64 percent of students received free/reduced lunches in the 2018-19 school year. Today that percentage is 53 percent.
And that’s how you end up with an 11-year-old who is willing to do what his state lawmakers are not — care about whether or not his peers can eat.
In my home state of Montana, last year our Republican Governor Greg Gianforte chose to opt out of a free pandemic-era federal school nutrition program, citing too much paperwork. You read that right, Gianforte is saying the administrative burden wasn’t worth the $10 million to feed hungry kids.
The cruelty is really the point, isn’t it?
But Missouri and Montana aren’t the only places that have put school meals on the chopping block.
Project 2025, right-wing conservatives’ guidebook in the event Trump is re-elected, has promised to do away with not only the Department of Education, but some of its best programs to help young people thrive, including school meals and early childhood education.
Led by the right-wing think tank, The Heritage Foundation, all 920-pages of Project 2025 detail the dismantling of federal departments that hold our democracy together and help our nation thrive.
Project 2025 will erase decades of progress, including all of the improvements made by Lyndon B. Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Johnson, who believed the key to a quality life was a quality education, aimed to help families living below the poverty line. The act has been modified several times to enhance students’ experience in public schools, adding resources for bilingual learners, prohibiting racial discrimination for teachers and students, and leveling the playing field for differently abled students. It added library funding, better access to textbooks, and improvements to the neighborhoods around schools.
Conservatives’ plan to defund public schools has been no secret. Specifically, they aim to take funding from schools that teach “woke ideology” and give funding to private charter schools.
For the capitalist backers of this project, education is a private commodity rather than a public responsibility.
Project 2025 has been signed by more than 100 conservative organizations and institutions as well as billionaire funders. It’s authors sow distrust in the public against families that use school meal programs. The document claims school meals are “some of the most wasteful federal programs in Washington.”
It accuses middle- and upper-class families of wildly abusing free school meals but offers no evidence for this sweeping claim.
You and I know better because we live in the real world and know that a tax return — or sometimes even a paystub — isn’t a solid indicator of a person’s ability to buy groceries. Especially in times of social and financial instability like the four- and a half-years since the start of the pandemic and the ever-changing technological landscape. America has suffered 7 million Covid-19 deaths. Inflation has made the price of pantry staples unpredictable. Interest rates have peaked. Housing is less affordable than any other time in recent history. AI — barely a concept five years ago — is taking more jobs than ever before.
We have the ingenuity and determination to meet these challenges, and quality education will help us get there. Johnson was right — school is the key that unlocks community flourishing.
But if communities are going to flourish, families have to be nourished.
Onward, Democracy Defenders!