Washington Times
COVID-19 pandemic dramatically alters school lunch programs across U.S.
USDA should continue to extend "universal free lunch"
By Brian McNicoll, ANALYSIS/OPINION
No more cafeteria food fights. No more rules against eating in class. No more scrounging for change to pay for school lunches.
Like everything else to do with education, the school lunch program will look dramatically different than when the pandemic brought the last school year to an end in March.
In many states, schools will reopen only virtually, and this arrangement could persist through the school year.
Elsewhere, schools will reopen, but the notion that kids will sit side-by-side in school cafeterias eating meals served in traditional school lunch lines is probably fanciful in the near term and could become a permanent casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the spring and through the summer, school systems across the nation have responded with programs to keep kids from going hungry. More than 80 percent of the school systems in the country through drive-through pickups, and more than half offer walk-up services, as even many of those in America’s middle-class suburbs struggle financially from loss of jobs.
One problem with this is that most of what school systems have done to feed their kids was not permitted.
Most did not require income verification — any student in the system could access meals, regardless of income.
Most didn’t even require that kids prove they went to the school where the distribution took place, and many allowed parents to pick up meals for their children.
Federal regulations on school lunches that require incomes to be verified, that distribution of food take place in the cafeteria and that kids, not parents, receive the food directly were waived in the spring by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the federal school lunch program.
The waivers were extended in May to cover the summer, but summer is winding down, and school systems are facing the prospect of not being able to feed their hungriest children unless they are extended. Thankfully, the USDA just extended the program to Dec. 31, 2020.
Many school officials say it is highly unlikely any students will eat in their public school cafeterias this year.
Social distancing can’t be maintained in cafeterias, where hundreds of rambunctious kids try to grab lunch together in the 20 minutes before recess. Sharing of plates and serving containers — and the potential for one diseased cafeteria worker to infect an entire school — make traditional serving arrangements impractical for now.
Some schools had planned to provide breakfasts and lunches to be eaten in the classroom, which also runs afoul of USDA regulations.
A group of Republican senators — Pat Roberts of Kansas, John Boozman of Arkansas, Mike Braun of Indianan, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, John Cornyn of Texas, Steve Daines of Montana, Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Cory Gardner of Colorado, John Hoeven of North Dakota, Cindy Hyde Smith of Mississippi, James Inhofe and James Lankford of Oklahoma, Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, John Thune of South Dakota and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — signed a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue asking him to extend the waivers of the regulations through this school year.
They asked Mr. Perdue to continue to allow students districts returning with virtual education to use “program flexibilities, grants or reimbursements that assist school food authorities with procuring, preparing and serving meals in a manner consistent with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 school re-opening guidelines and that support non-school sponsors providing meals to children on remote-learning days or when in-classroom learning is unavailable.”
One such provision will be to continue to extend “universal free lunch” to even those school districts that normally do not have enough participation in the federal free-lunch and free-breakfast programs to qualify. This would remove the problem of teachers having to collect lunch money for meals served in the classroom and the growing problem of collecting unpaid school lunch debts.
Another would be to allow school systems to use federal lunch money for covid-related expenses such as plastic cutlery and PPE for school lunch personnel.
From inverted sports seasons to virtual classrooms to meals-to-go, school is not going to look the same this year. School systems are adjusting, but the solutions do not require the massive infusion of cash contemplated by Democrats. They merely require the Trump administration to do what it is the best ever at — cutting harmful regulations.
In this case, it only required that rules be changed temporarily to fit the times. And that’s what Republicans were asking Mr. Perdue to accomplish.
Brian McNicoll, a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., is a former senior writer for The Heritage Foundation and former director of communications for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.