A bill that would provide free meals for all public school students in Virginia passed the Senate Education and Health Committee Thursday.

“This is about making sure that every kid who goes to school gets fed — no questions asked,” said Sen. Danica Roem, D-Manassas, the patron for , earlier this month.

The proposal would cost over the next two years.

Some Republicans including Sen. Mark Peake, R-Lynchburg, balked at the cost.

“I just obviously do not want any child to go hungry and do not want any child who cannot afford a meal to go hungry, either breakfast or lunch, but I just think at this point, I’m not quite ready to say that the commonwealth is going to pay for breakfast and lunch for every child in the commonwealth when you got [wealthy] counties,” Peake said. “I just don’t see that we should take general fund dollars to pay for breakfast and lunch in some of the wealthiest counties in the commonwealth.”

Roem noted even Virginia’s wealthiest counties, such as Loudoun, have schools that qualify for federal school lunch programs and have significant school meal debt. Furthermore, she said, many families fall just outside the eligibility limit for free and reduced meals.

Catherine Ford, a lobbyist representing the School Nutrition Association of Virginia, contended the state should be putting funds toward universal meals.

“We believe that just like textbooks, just like school buses, just like desks, that meals should be provided to children at school,” Ford said.

Proposal

If passed, all public school divisions in Virginia would be required to make meals available for free to any student unless their parent had notified the school board to not do so.

The state would reimburse schools for each meal.

Currently, only schools that qualify for the federal Community Eligibility Provision can offer all students free meals. Schools qualify for the CEP if a certain percentage of their students are classified as low-income.

Previously the federal government set that threshold at 40%, but this September the U.S. Department of Agriculture lowered it to 25%, a change it said would “give states and schools greater flexibility to offer meals to all enrolled students at no cost when financially viable.”

Roem’s measure would expand free meals to even those schools that don’t qualify for the CEP.

The legislation would also require school boards to adopt policies to maximize their use of federal funds for free breakfast and lunch and create a workgroup to study the potential impact of offering guaranteed school meals.

A step beyond earlier legislation

Roem said this year’s proposal is an extension of she successfully carried that required divisions to apply to enroll any schools in CEP that qualified for it.

Generally, Roem said school breakfasts in Virginia cost $34 million per year, while lunches cost $138 million.

During a Jan. 11 hearing on her newest proposal, Roem said that because of the 2020 legislation, 44 schools in Prince William County, which lies in her district, have zero school meal debt compared to more than 50 schools that just enrolled in the CEP this year and had together collected $291,256 of school meal debt in the first semester of the prior year.

“Not every single student who attends a CEP school can’t afford their own breakfast and lunch,” Roem said. “A lot of them come from families that can, but most of the students … have enough insecurity at home financially that they need help, and collectively, we’ve decided it’s in our interest, it’s in the student’s interest and it’s the parent’s interest to make sure that we are taking care of everyone at the school.”

Adelle Settle, founder of nonprofit Settle the Debt, which raised roughly $250,000 last year to pay down the lunch debt for students in Prince William County, said she often hears from parents “who earn just over the threshold to receive free or reduced meals for their students, but they’re still struggling and they need help to pay for those school meals.”

Meal debt, Roem also said, is “money that could’ve gone into other areas such as a classroom or computer lab.”

“And frankly, if the federal government isn’t going to do its job, as far as I’m concerned, of fully funding universal free school meals for all, then we’ve got to step in and take care of our student constituents,” she said.

The bill now goes to the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee for consideration.

Addressing food insecurity in higher education

Roem is also carrying , which would create a grant program to address food insecurity among students at public colleges or universities in Virginia.

The bill is also heading to Senate Finance and Appropriations.

“With college enrollment still lower than it was pre-pandemic, addressing food insecurity can help students afford tuition and housing so they can stay in school and graduate on time,” she said.

Under the program, public institutions could apply for grants to address food insecurity.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

On Tuesdays, three Little Caesars stores across Oakland County, Michigan, make 273 pizzas in the morning even before they open for business. On Wednesdays, another 320 pies are out the door before noon.

But their customers aren’t sports fans ditching work to watch a day game. They’re students in the Huron Valley Schools in Highland, Michigan, northwest of Detroit. 

“Our little kids cheer when the pizzas come. It’s one thing our kids can count on,” said Sara Simmerman, food and nutrition supervisor for the 8,600-student district.

Like most districts across the country, Huron Valley is facing unprecedented food and labor shortages caused by what say is nearing a “global transport systems collapse.” Experts say as the economy reopened following lockdowns, multiple industries — including those involved in delivering food and supplies to schools — have faced increased demand they can’t meet.

Many predict the could extend throughout the rest of the school year. Forced to adapt their meal programs to a grab-and-go system last year when schools shut down for remote learning, school nutrition departments are now scrambling to find menu items and enlisting front office staff and school administrators to serve meals.

“We’ve been told it may even get worse before it gets better,” Simmerman said. The district’s partnership with MAC Foods Group, which owns the Little Caesars stores, began before the pandemic, and has become a rare source of stability as the district increasingly improvises its in-house menus. 

The unpredictability of deliveries adds to the frustration. A satellite kitchen that serves the district’s elementary schools recently received only 35 of  400 cases of food ordered. A few days later, 700 cases arrived at once.

“You never know what you’re going to get,” Simmerman said. “It’s amazing how many kids want to eat salad when you don’t have lettuce.”

A nationwide is one piece of the complex puzzle that determines whether Los Angeles students get applesauce or schools across Michigan’s Oakland County offer chocolate milk. 

“Deliveries of goods and foods are extremely delayed. It now takes an average of eight weeks to receive an item that previously showed up in two to three weeks,” said Lieling Hwang, assistant director of nutrition services for the Long Beach Unified School District in California. “Typically, these deliveries are coming in short, as well.”

That means middle and high school students aren’t getting their favorite “spicy cheese crunchers,” and the whole wheat croissants that were used to make breakfast sandwiches have been discontinued, Hwang said.

‘Don’t have the luxury’

Some school nutrition directors are scheduling deliveries after hours or directing distributors to central warehouses and then using district staff to get food to local schools, said Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced in assistance to help school nutrition departments keep up with rising costs. The funds will provide schools with fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy products. This would free up other funds to offer hiring bonuses to address staffing shortages. But Pratt-Heaver noted that agricultural commodities usually account for only 15 to 20 percent of what districts serve, and they still have to rely on vendors and distributors for other food and supplies. 

The lack of paper products, for example, is almost as bad as the shortage of food, said Sharon Glosson, executive director of the North East Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas. 

“There really isn’t an alternative to a plate,” she said, adding that in the past, staff would use multiple plates or containers because some children like to keep their food separated. “We don’t have the luxury to do that anymore.” Elementary schools in the district, meanwhile, use plastic trays with compartments, but washing them takes labor, and the district still has almost 150 unfilled positions.

Labor shortages are also a challenge for MAC Foods Group.When stores are short-staffed, Simmerman and administrative assistant Colleen Armstrong pitch in. 

“We go and deliver the pizzas ourselves if we have to,” Simmerman said. 

Costs are ‘soaring’

Nutrition directors say that while students might not get their favorite entrees, they’re keeping children fed. Parents don’t have to pay for school meals because Congress made them free for all students this year. But it’s the shortages students face when they go home that Hwang and others worry most about. 

“These issues do affect students outside of school as the cost of foods [and] supplies is soaring,” Hwang said. “Scarcity and unaffordability … makes food insecurity even more pronounced now.”

Congress created the Pandemic EBT — electronic benefit transfer — program to cover the cost of food for students while schools were closed. The American Rescue Plan, the relief package passed in March, continued the program through the summer and this school year. But the program is only meant to serve students who are learning remotely.

An increase in the benefits low-income families receive through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program took effect , providing about $36 more a month per person. But the supply chain bottlenecks are causing at the grocery store, and are experiencing some of the same shortages as schools. 

Affected by labor shortages, wildfires and the pandemic, the Oregon Food Bank, for one, has seen a drop in food donations as well as higher prices at a time when demand for services has doubled. The disruption means less fresh produce and affects supplies at school food pantries that low-income families depend on for weekend meals, said spokeswoman Ashley Mumm. The food bank provided funds to the school pantry programs so they could stock up at grocery outlets and big box stores like Costco.

“More and more barriers are placed in front of families,” said Lucy Coady, director of No Kid Hungry, a national campaign of the nonprofit Share Our Strength. “This is affecting every aspect of how hungry kids are fed across the country.”