Offer More US School Meals for Free, Group Urges

Wednesday 04 March 2009

by: Charles Abbott | Visit article original @ Reuters

Children eat at their school cafeteria. The School Nutrition Association is pushing Congress to provide more funding for school meals. (Photo: KCBS)

Washington - More poor children should be allowed to eat for free at school and the government should pay higher reimbursement rates for school meals, a school food service group said at a US Senate hearing on Wednesday.

The School Nutrition Association also endorsed a proposal that any food or beverage sold at school, even from vending machines, must comply with US nutrition standards.

Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, whose committee oversees public nutrition, told reporters on Tuesday he liked the idea of standards for vending machine snacks at schools.

An array of child nutrition programs including school lunch and the Women, Infants and Children food program are due for renewal this year by Congress. They cost $21 billion a year.

Most school lunches and breakfasts are free for poor children.

About 3.1 million children, whose families are slightly more affluent, buy reduced-price meals each day. Some 1 million reduced-price breakfasts are sold daily.

The reduced-price category should be turned into free meals, said Katie Wilson, president of the school meal group.

The group also asked for an additional 35 cents reimbursement for each lunch and an extra 20 cents for each breakfast served. Some 32 million lunches and 11 million breakfasts are served daily at school.

The association did not say how much its proposals would cost. The higher reimbursement would offset food price increases and help improve the quality of the meals.

Based on current participation and reimbursement rates, it could cost $260 million a year to convert reduced-price meals into free meals and higher reimbursement rates could cost $2 billion a year, according to Reuters estimates.

President Barack Obama, who has a goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015, proposed a $1 billion a year increase in funding for child nutrition last week. It would be used for "improving program access, enhancing the nutritional quality of school meals, expanding nutrition research and evaluation, and improving program oversight," said the White House.

"Now Congress must make good on this proposal by dedicating real resources in our budget," Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, said at the hearing.

Wilson said a study by her association found, on average, it cost 35 cents more to produce a lunch than the federal reimbursement rate of $2.57.

But the committee also reviewed a study commissioned by the Agriculture Department that said the cost of a lunch during the 2005/06 school year was $2.36, compared to the reimbursement rate of $2.51 then in effect.

Costs have risen sharply in the past couple of years, said Wilson.

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(Reporting by Charles Abbott; editing by Anthony Boadle.)