WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Agriculture Department is ending two pandemic-era programs that provided more than $1 billion for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farmers and producers.
About $660 million of that went to schools and childcare centers to buy food for meals through the Local Foods for Schools program. A separate program provided money to food banks.
In Maine, the money allowed the coastal RSU 23 school district to buy food directly from fisherman, dairy producers and farmers for school meals, said Caroline Trinder, the district’s food and nutrition services director.
“I think everyone can say that they want kids at school to receive the healthiest meals possible,” Trinder said. “It’s the least processed, and we’re helping our local economy, we’re helping farmers that may be the parents of our students.”
The cuts will hurt school districts with “chronically underfunded” school meal budgets, said Shannon Gleave, president of the School Nutrition Association.
“In addition to losing the benefits for our kids, this loss of funds is a huge blow to community farmers and ranchers and is detrimental to school meal programs struggling to manage rising food and labor costs,” Gleave said in a statement.
I’ll just basically copy/paste my response to this from the other day.
I usually don’t like tooting my own horn, but I’m speaking as someone with 18 years of experience in the financial aspects of school food service. I was one of those middle-management bean counters working for large districts around the Northeast. It is the job of people like me to not only research possible grants and funding sources and ensure the district is getting the maximum benefit, but also to ensure that those benefits are used to their fullest potential to deliver meals to students. We are used to having to deal with fluctuations in what funding we receive and are expected to be able to plan accordingly. If we of all people are the ones saying there’s a problem, there’s a fucking problem. Like 9.5 on the Richter scale type of problem.
There’s a problem.
This will absolutely wreck school food service in many schools. Even before Trump ever set foot in the White House, school food service was often the red-headed stepchild of many school districts that operated on shoestring budgets and were almost always the first to get cuts whenever the school district needed to tighten its belt. These food aid programs in many districts were the only things keeping these programs anything resembling solvent in the first place. I cannot emphasize enough how reliant that our NSLP programs are on this funding.
At least right now, schools are still required to continue serving lunch under federal law. Of course, I’m sure that this will be rectified once Trump realizes that the NSLP exists and decides to cut that too because the program is using food grown in Canada to feed gay kids or something. What this is going to lead to is that NSLP programs are going to be cut to federally required minimums. And without these grants to pay for it, other school services will have to be cut. Teachers will have to be laid off. Other programs will have to be cut in order to pay for school food service. All of this and students will end up receiving less nutritious meals than they received before anyway. Again, that’s until Trump realizes the program even exists and just shuts it down entirely.
You know how we occasionally see those articles about students carrying huge lunch debts at school? Think that, except worse. And everywhere. The only option left for some of these districts is going to be to at least try to pass the costs on to students and their parents who are unlikely to be able to pay, leading to even more students with ridiculously high balances. These accounts are just going to default as these students either just leave the district or graduate, and most districts have no real method of enforcement outside of making demands to parents and just hoping parents don’t realize that those threats are toothless and unenforceable. And somebody has to pay for the food. Somebody has to pay the food service and custodial staff. Which means the district is going to be forced to pick up the tab. And you know how they’re going to do that? Laying off teachers. Cutting vital programs. Ending after-school programs. Continuing to use textbooks (and for that matter, a lot of other equipment and technology) that are years and decades out of date because the district can’t afford new ones.
Most people are going to think that it’s school lunch and no big deal. They’ll just serve a few less french fries or something. Nope. This is a much bigger deal than most people will realize and is going to cause a ripple/domino effect that is going to impact every level of service in the public school systems.
Think of it like a flat tire. If you hear someone got a flat, you think “No big deal”. Then you get a flat, and you realize…that problem that you thought was “no big deal” means that your entire car is not going anywhere until it’s fixed. Now imagine that problem occurring and you realize that they stopped selling tires.
I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people.
