By Aaliyah Bowden | The Charlotte Post
For many children in North Carolina, going to school means confusion over meal eligibility.
During the pandemic, a federally subsidized program allowed all K-12 students to receive free breakfast and lunch. However, lawmakers’ impasse over the state budget has put the program in jeopardy. One in six North Carolina children – about 416,000 – are food insecure, according to FEED NC, a food advocacy nonprofit.
“The problem is that the General Assembly did not fund it on a recurring basis,” said Katie Dawkins, communications manager for the nonpartisan School Meals for All NC.
“So, on June 30, when they didn’t have a budget, then that funding stopped. So, you’ve got some families depending on what district they’re in, going back to school, and they haven’t had to pay for meals during the pandemic. If they were qualified for reduced [prices], they didn’t pay last year, but this year, they’re going to have to pay the reduced price for lunch, but not for breakfast.”
The state’s public education system is a patchwork of policies regarding free and reduced-cost meals. More than 100 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools campuses participate in the Community Eligibility Provision, a federal program that provides all students with breakfast and lunch at no charge.
“We went from 68 CEP schools, where all students eat breakfast and lunch for free to 111 this fiscal year — a pretty significant jump,” CMS Chief Operations Officer Brian Schultz said. “That is obviously a result of Medicaid as a direct qualifier now, so it increased the number of students who didn’t have to fill out a free reduced lunch form.”
Schultz added that “on the first day of school, CMS served 54,000 lunches and on the third day, they served 58,000.
“Our school nutrition department has a wildly important goal, a goal to increase lunch participation this school year. So that’s something we’ll be tracking and monitoring all year long.”
Student meal eligibility policies differ among North Carolina’s 115 school districts based on household income.
Parents racked up $4 million in school meal debt in the 2022-23 academic. CMS accumulated more than $200,000 in unpaid debt, according to a survey conducted by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.
“We’re talking about students. They have zero control over their family income,” Dawkins said.
“There’s no child in any public school who should go through that lunch line worrying if there’s money on their account.”Some students may skip meals at school because they are afraid to tell their parents they owe money on their account.“I spoke with someone at a conference last week and one of her children is a rising senior,” Dawkins said. “She told me that her son would not tell her he needed more money on his account and if he didn’t have any, he just wouldn’t eat that day.”
Community groups and organizations are working to resolve the problem.
School Meals for All NC advocates for every school to provide free breakfast and lunch for all students.“We just want every child to be able to go through that breakfast line, go through that lunch line, without having to pay a reduced cost without having to have the stigma of ‘oh you get free meals, you get reduced cost meals’ – everybody is on the same playing field,” Dawkins said.
CMS students who attend non-CEP schools will still receive breakfast.
“If you’re not at a CEP school, then we are really pushing the free and reduced lunch applications,” Schultz said. “I’m really happy to report that we’re at 16,000 applications processed. At this time last year, we had 14,000.”
