Students getting their l lunch at a primary school in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Amanda Mills/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Maine’s universal free school meals program is under threat as a result of proposed federal budget cuts, combined with the drop in bipartisan support at the state level.
Five years ago, Maine became one of the first states nationwide to make school meals free for all students regardless of family income. That resulted in a majority of students benefiting from the program and led to increases in the number of students eating at school, but with a proposed $12 billion federal funding cut to school meals and cuts to Medicare and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the inability of the state to make up for the loss of federal funding in the state budget, advocates are sounding the alarm to try and preserve free breakfast and lunch, as well as summer and after school meals for all public school students.
For a state such as Maine, which faces the highest child food insecurity in New England, that presents serious cause for concern, according to experts from several nonprofit organizations, the Maine Department of Education and food bank leaders.
“We’re very concerned about these overlapping cuts as they pile on,” said Anna Korsen, policy and program director at Full Plates Full Potential, a nonprofit working with the state on several nutrition programs.
“We know that school budgets cannot shoulder those cuts. We know that the state budget can’t afford these cuts. So we’re concerned about how all of them together will impact funding for these programs.”
Under the universal meal program, the state pays districts to offer meals without charging students, but the amount of money that comes from the federal government depends on the percentage of low-income families each public school serves. The higher the percentage of families that qualify for free meals, the bigger the federal reimbursement. Traditionally, this percentage was determined by parents filling out free-and-reduced meal applications, but now that school meals are free for all students, the state shifted away from relying on the applications and now uses different ways of determining the free and reduced meal eligibility in each school, which is an important data point used for various federally funded programs.
One option is the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which at least 75 schools are using this year, according to Maine Department of Education and federal data. CEP simplifies the process by automatically qualifying schools with a high percentage of low-income students for the higher reimbursement rate.
Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees school lunch programs, lowered the CEP eligibility threshold from 40% to 25%, meaning more schools could receive federal meal funding starting the 2024-25 school year. However, Maine has not yet adopted this change. If it does, nearly 400 schools could qualify for CEP starting next year. The 75 schools currently using the provision all qualified using the 40% threshold.
But the $12 billion cut proposes raising the CEP threshold to 60%, drastically reducing the number of eligible schools in Maine from hundreds to just 31. This would put the burden on the state or districts, which does not have the budget to support the lack of funding, Korsen said.
Cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would further strain the free meals program by reducing eligibility for federal reimbursement, because CEP takes into account participation in these programs to determine which families can be considered economically disadvantaged.
Last year, the Maine Department of Education also started using this data (called direct certification) to determine student eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch.Any child who is enrolled in SNAP or MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program, is automatically deemed eligible for free and reduced price school meals, so that means that the school is going to receive federal funding to support feeding those students even without being a CEP school, Korsen said.
If work requirements or other restrictions are added to SNAP and MaineCare, fewer families would qualify for these programs. As a result, even the 31 schools that currently meet the 60% threshold for CEP could lose their eligibility.
“At some point there’s going to have to be hard choices, and we don’t want school meals for all to suffer because of that,” she said.
Finally, Korsen warned that although Gov. Janet Mills has called for extending the universal meal program in her budget proposal, its once bipartisan support is “unraveling at the state level,” as the cost of the program has grown with inflation.
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