Several bills this legislative session opt for either universal free breakfast and lunch, or for free meals for students who are currently eligible for reduced-pricing.
To date, no one has publicly gone on record to oppose supplying free lunches to students in Hawaiʻi. So what's the holdup?
Price. Or rather, the ambiguity behind what exactly the price will be.
Rep. Scot Matayoshi has continuously been one of the prominent introducers of free lunch bills. He stated that the state Department of Education has provided a “moving target” on the cost estimate for the program in the past.
“I think the first hearing they ever testified on, they put out some kind of number like $800,000, then it went to something crazy like $12 million, and then it went up to like $36 million a year,” Matayoshi said. “I mean it moved up dramatically every time they testified.”
The discrepancy between these estimates did not create enough certainty for the bills to move forward.
But organizations outside the DOE have calculated more accurate estimates that stay rather consistent.
Hawaiʻi Appleseedʻs “Equity on the Menu” shows a cost estimate of $26 million per year. This would be 1.2% of the Hawaiʻi DOE's overall annual budget, set this year at just over $2 billion.
In a House Education Committee hearing on Feb. 11, DOE Superintendent Keith Hayashi stated that their current estimate is just over $44 million. Apart from rising food costs, the DOE was unable to provide an answer on why this increased from previous estimates.
How do keiki currently qualify?
The current system across state public schools involves an application process at the beginning of the school year that families can fill out to gauge their eligibility for either reduced-price or free lunch and breakfast.
Nicole Woo, the director of research and economic policy at Hawaiʻi Children's Action Network, noted this workload often falls on the school administration. She said there is a lot of paperwork and time that goes into the process. Applications need to be collected, eligibility has to be determined, eligible students have to be categorized and counted, and fees must be collected.
“With universal free school meals, the schools don't have to do the income eligibility determinations, and they don't have to collect the cost of the price for the meal,” Woo said. “They don't have to know each student's category when they count them, they just need to count how many meals they served. So it's a big savings on the admin side for the schools, and so that helps mitigate the cost.”
For parents like Christine Russo, this application process has its downfalls. She said the form is only accessible at the beginning of the year and doesn’t account for possible language barriers.
“But then the biggest challenge is maybe a parent or a family does apply, but they don't qualify because they don't meet the income threshold,” Russo said. “However, that doesn't mean that they're not struggling. When we're talking about breakfast and lunch, possibly for multiple children, over the course of that month, that's a significant amount of money and it's hard for struggling families, even if you don't meet that threshold.”
Taking Russo's family of five as an example, with the current DOE thresholds for annual income eligibility, her household would have to make less than $54,691 for her three children to be eligible for free meals, and less than $77,830 for reduced-price meals.
“I’m not struggling the way other families are struggling, but regardless, a universal school lunch program would be so helpful in just taking another thing off our plate,” Russo said. “It would make a huge impact because they would be guaranteed those meals when they go to school. It doesn't matter who you are, you have that security of knowing that no matter what, they're going to eat that day.”
Matayoshi said that implementing universal free lunches creates a ripple effect that helps students and teachers as a whole, because hungry keiki often distract the rest of the class.
“Yes, this bill is to feed students who are hungry, but I think parents everywhere need to understand that even if their child can afford school lunch, their child is also being affected by those in the class that cannot afford it and are not getting fed properly,” Matayoshi said.
Another key factor in the mix is federal reimbursements
Under the National School Lunch Program, schools get a certain amount of federal reimbursement for each meal served, and the reimbursement amount varies based on what category the meal falls into. This means the amount reimbursed for a reduced-price meal differs from that of a full-priced or free meal.
Woo, who has worked to implement free school meal programs in other states, said the states that have adopted this program make up the difference between the federal reimbursements and the total costs of the meals.
“In some states, they think of meals as just one of the basics for education,” Woo said. “We all know that hungry children can't learn. So if states are concerned about their children's education and academic progress, it seems like making sure that they're fed, and fed nutritious meals, should be a priority.”
However, Matayoshi is concerned that recent changes on the federal level will result in reductions in reimbursement amounts, not increases.
“If we get an increase in reimbursement, then it makes it a lot more affordable, so if that federal subsidy increases, I think it would make it a lot more financially tenable,” Matayoshi said. “But with all the federal budget craziness going on and federal grants being withheld, the budget is in such turmoil right now and I’m not sure which version, if any, of that is going to pass this year.”
Jessica Kato, who has two kids in elementary school, said price isn’t a good enough reason for these bills to fail at the Legislature.
“Especially in this national political climate, it's really important for Hawaiʻi to do what they think is right for our keiki and I think it's really up to our state to step up,” Kato said. “If there's any state that should be embracing gathering around food and sharing food and destigmatizing who can and can't have food, it should be Hawaiʻi.”
The following four bills passed a floor vote in the House and will next be heard by the House Finance Committee:
- HB424: free breakfast and lunch to public school students who are eligible for the current reduced-price meal program
- HB757: free breakfast and lunch to all enrolled students in department schools
- HB1075: reduces the required amount enrolled students pay for school meals
- HB1500: repeals DOE’s ability to set a price for school meals
