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The USDA Summer Feeding Program allows local schools and sponsors to provide loose healthy foods to youth during the summer. This Cardington, Ohio-hosted site is featured poolside to appeal to families who may need it.
Many students have been able to continue receiving school meals in recent summers thanks to the rest of the government regulations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the number of loose lunches served has decreased since the peak of 2020.
Summer sites will offer healthy foods to supply the mandatory food that many students lack when school ends. The number of students receiving loose lunches in 2022 has declined compared to the best post-pandemic years, but is still above July 2019 levels, according to a new Food Research report.
FRAC hunger doesn’t take a vacation: The State of Summer Nutrition report shows that 3 million youth earned a loose lunch through USDA summer nutrition systems on an average day in July 2022, down 44. 5 percent from a peak of 5. 59 million youth in July 2020. Last year’s turnout was above pre-pandemic levels with another 201,549 children receiving loose food across the country, the FRAC reported.
Clarissa Hayes, assistant director of the FRAC’s school and extracurricular program team, said that before the pandemic, the FRAC still had a statewide purpose to r 40 youth with a summer lunch for one and one hundred youth who won a loose prize. or discounted lunch in the last school year.
“We had about five states that met that benchmark,” Hayes said of the past few years, but no state met the FRAC purpose in the summer of 2022.
New Jersey had the participation with 35. 3 consistent scholars with 100, followed by Vermont with 27. 6, New Mexico with 22. 8 and Maryland with 10. 5.
The most recent report indicates that, on average, only 1 in 11 students earned free summer lunches compared to those who earned free lunches during the school year. ” Forty-four states and the District of Columbia offered a summer breakfast to less than one child for each and every one of the five youth from families that attended the school year lunch,” the report says.
Before the pandemic, at least 50% of youth in a geographic domain had to be eligible for loose or discounted school meals to be considered a summer meal site. Once we decided that a site was eligible, all students who visited it may only get loose food. When the pandemic was in effect, USDA’s legal national exemptions allowed any network to offer loose food sites, regardless of the eligibility requirements of the previous domain.
Hayes said those waivers along with universal loose lunches during the pandemic have helped expand the program’s success. Removing site limitations only in spaces of greatest need, he added, “has been a game-changer to increase participation in summer meals. “
Lowering this threshold from the current 50 percent to 40 percent of youth eligible for reduced or loose lunches would also help expand the outreach, as many communities are on the verge of not participating, he added.
“We know it would bring a lot of sites that had to be cut last summer because they didn’t have that exemption,” Hayes said.
It’s unclear what the participation rates are this summer, Hayes said. “There were no waivers for this summer, so operations have returned to pre-pandemic rules. It remains to be seen how it will play out this summer,” he said.
Diane Pratt-Heavner, director of media relations for the School Nutrition Association, said too many young people live in communities that are eligible to host a summer meal program.
“Exemptions from collecting food needs allowed families to bring food to go if their operating hours prohibited them from taking their children to eat and eat. SNA strongly supports greater flexibility for summer feeding systems,” he said. “During the pandemic, school meal systems have had the flexibility to identify summer feeding points where they saw the need, greatly expanding access to summer food for at-risk families, especially those with limited access to reliable transportation. “
Another impactful update to allow students to take home more than a day’s worth of food to consume later, which offer more rural access sites. Make sure families have mandatory refrigeration and can prepare those foods. It also brings a trade-off when it comes to food quality and appeal, he added, as foods would possibly want to be more solid and potentially “less nutritionally healthy. “”
In the general investment bill for fiscal year 2023, Congress approved a summer plan consistent with a $40 permanent electronic benefits (EBT) movement consistent with children for those entitled to loose or discounted lunches the school year beginning in summer 2024. The bus also allows non-congregations to serve food in underserved rural areas.
The American Rescue Plan Act, the COVID-19 stimulus package passed early in the Biden administration, also included some adjustments to summer eating rules. Under this law, whenever a school year had a public fitness emergency at any time, students would automatically be eligible for the EBT pandemic the following summer (including 2023) if states committed to employing federal funds.
Kelsey Boone, senior child nutrition policy analyst at FRAC, said seven states should not apply before the July 14 registration deadline to use the final year of pandemic EBT. after one last plea. He said some of that resolution was pushed through the states involved in the tight schedule, while in other states “it was more political” because the pandemic was over.
Boone said that in at least some of the states, the “good news” is that at least some of them “have a more positive view of the prospect of adopting a permanent summer EBT program. “
According to Hayes, two or three states conducted pilot demonstrations with a summer EBT program with widespread interest, but limited funding, a year before the pandemic.
Pandemic EBT, he argued, has evidence that it works.
“It’s one of the most effective systems to combat summer, and I think kids lack confidence in food in general,” she said. and that they had the infrastructure to do it. “
Hayes said summer EBT has been a priority for FRAC for many years to supplement summer feeding sites. Congressional authorizations or sponsors to bring youth to the sites.
“Summer feeding systems, like all policies designed to alleviate hunger, only work and the investments we are willing to make in them,” said Eric Mitchell, executive director of the Alliance to End Hunger. “As Congress and USDA invest more and more flexibilities in the pandemic, summer food share increased significantly; When those supports disappeared, young people and families paid the price.
“The ongoing summer EBT program created by Congress last year has the prospect of ensuring millions of young people get nutritious food when school is closed. We will have to continue to act smart for those young people and the providers who care for them. “
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