The ability of schoolchildren to afford their next meal and the $7 trillion Congressional budget can seem like distant issues. Yet the most recent federal budget has proven these topics to be tightly intertwined.
In late February, the House passed its budget proposal for 2025, as well as directives for how funding over the next ten years should proceed. These included a round of significant budget cuts to core house committees, including $880 billion from the Energy and Commerce Committee, $230 billion from the Agricultural Committee and $330 billion from the Education and Workforce Committee. These committees oversee programs that benefit millions of Americans, including Medicaid and Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Head Start and school lunch access for children.
A decline in funding of this magnitude will force these committees to cut or rollback these programs, which would be devastating to many, especially schoolchildren. As many programs overseen by these committees ensure access to lunches for public school students, decreasing their funding will likely impact these programs. Losing free and reduced lunches, which are estimated to feed over 60 percent of all public school students, would not only inhibit access to nutritious meals but also negatively impact their academic performance. It also impacts a child’s ability to attend school, which should be considered a violation of their right to an equal-opportunity education.
Under the law, children have a right to equal educational opportunity regardless of their race, background, sex or socioeconomic status. When not being able to afford a school lunch is a barrier because of one of these factors, and therefore an inhibiting factor to accessing quality education, then it should be an obligation of the school to provide them with one. If this is no longer something that will be guaranteed through federal funding, then it should be a priority of states and districts to ensure that children continue to be able to fulfill their basic needs when they are at school, including having access to school lunch.
Decreased federal funding, and therefore school lunch programs, would violate this, especially through the rollback of the Community Eligibility Provision. CEP is a federal program that provides low-cost or free lunch to a school based on demonstrated need and currently ensures that 23.6 million schoolchildren can access meals at school. Due to the cuts, lawmakers have proposed raising the required level to qualify for the CEP program, rendering millions of children ineligible for free lunches.
Both Orange County Public School and Chapel-Hill Carrboro City Schools qualify for CEP, and OCPS uses it. However, if the required level were to be raised, it is likely that neither would qualify at all. Even in the case that the required level to participate in CEP stayed the same, changes to Medicaid or SNAP could still drastically change who could qualify for CEP. Regardless, this would be devastating to schools across North Carolina, potentially affecting over 2,500 currently CEP-eligible schools and hundreds of thousands of students.
Programs like CEP ensure that children are not left behind simply because they cannot afford school lunches. Children should not have to worry about access to their next meal interfering with their ability to learn, or potentially to attend school. Access to school lunches for children must be guaranteed, regardless of their socioeconomic status. If federally funded programs that benefit millions of children across the country, including in North Carolina, are to be rolled back, then, states and districts must ensure that these programs continue to function. It is critical to the livelihood of North Carolina students and should be a priority in ensuring equal access to education across the state.
