One moment helps crystallize for Harley Sterling the importance of providing free school meals.
Now the school nutrition director for the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union, Sterling remembered one morning when Vermont still used a needs-based meal system, rather than giving every student free food.
Sterling had prepared a buttermilk pancake breakfast and watched a student make a packed plate piled with pancakes and fruit.
Suddenly, the student “turned white as a ghost,” Sterling recalled, and said, “I just remembered I’m not supposed to get this because my mom started working.” According to Sterling, the student left their full plate on the counter and took off without eating breakfast, because he no longer qualified for free meals.
For Scott Fay, director of food services in the Essex Westford School District, the proof is in the cultural shift he’s seen since the universal school meals program began during the Covid-19 pandemic. There are simply more students eating breakfast and lunch, and he’s able to make better food.
“Our cafeteria was kind of like a ghost town in the mornings,” he said. “Now, our cafeteria is chock-full of kids. It’s just a beautiful community to see that wasn’t there before.”
Although universal school meals started as a fully federally-funded program in Vermont, the Legislature voted in 2023 to continue the initiative indefinitely, committing state funds to provide free breakfast and lunch to students regardless of their household income.
Two years later, as part of his “education transformation” plan, Gov. Phil Scott has put the state’s universal school meals program on the chopping block. In his budget proposal presented last month, Scott recommended the state prevent any property tax increases next year by buying down rates and cutting spending — including the breakfast and lunch initiative.
According to Scott, nixing the program would help bring down education property taxes. He’s also argued the program is regressive.
“We should not be asking lower income families to pay for meals for more affluent families,” Amanda Wheeler, a Scott spokesperson, said this week. “The proposal doesn’t roll back school meal support entirely, but instead, reverts to the needs-based construct that existed prior to universal school meals.”
Savings for families
As a line item, universal school meals would cost Vermont about $18.5 million next year, inside the more than $2 billion education fund. To cut it, Scott would need the Legislature’s sign off.
But legislative economists say that providing meals to all students brings in significant federal dollars and reduces local spending in other ways, too. Were Vermont to revert to a needs-based approach, it would retain some money from Washington for school nutrition. But the Vermont Agency of Education estimates that statewide, the universal meals program will draw down an extra $16.9 million in federal reimbursements next year.
Plus, the program’s supporters argue well-fed kids learn better, and creating equal access to food removes the stigma attached to receiving free meals based on a student’s economic status. Several other states provide free meals as well, including Maine, Massachusetts and Minnesota.
Scott has said that if the Legislature is opposed to the repeal, lawmakers need to find an equivalent way to lower property taxes — something that hasn’t yet happened.
Meanwhile, support for the program appears strong and growing.
At the Statehouse Thursday, a group of anti-hunger advocates, school officials and lawmakers declared their intent to maintain the free meals initiative. House and Senate Democratic leadership have united in support of universal meals, and some Republicans have joined their colleagues across the aisle, too. In a straw poll, the House Agriculture, Food Resiliency and Forestry Committee voted unanimously to support the program last week.
According to advocates who spoke Thursday, the program costs about $30 per Vermonter annually. The Agency of Education says it saves families $1100 per student on the cost of food.
Rep. Heather Suprenant, D-Barnard, said that as a student in Randolph, she’d benefited from free meals.
“I didn’t fully understand the financial burden that was lifted from my dad when he didn’t have to worry about meals for me and my sister,” she said. “It’s a very full circle moment to be on the other side of this conversation, no longer a student, but as a policymaker, and I find myself asking, how is this program even up for debate?”
Better meals, supporting local farms
Despite the governor’s preference, Vermont’s top school nutrition official, a director within the state’s Agency of Education, does not recommend cutting the program, arguing it’s cost effective.
VTDigger obtained an internal Agency of Education memo through a public records request, written before Scott publicly announced his recommended budget. In the document, Rosie Krueger, state director of child nutrition programs, told her superiors in the agency that the state stood to lose nearly $17 million in federal dollars next year by cutting universal school meals. She also predicted that many school districts would likely decide to continue the program on their own — as some had done previously — thus passing on costs to property taxpayers across the state.
“Schools would incur administrative costs of collecting and processing school meals applications each fall and collecting bills for lunch,” Krueger wrote. “We would anticipate that affluent districts would return to relying on significant a la carte sales to stay viable, which are typically less healthy than the reimbursable meal options.”
Krueger also noted that a repeal would prevent the state from drawing down federal funds for summer and after-school meals — a new area targeted for expansion.
School nutrition leaders say that the state’s current program has allowed them to purchase more food from local farms and focus more on cooking from scratch. Without devoting resources to cash registers and accounting, more time is spent in the kitchen — and kids are reaping the rewards.
In the Windham Northeast district, Sterling said he’s more excited to go above and beyond in the kitchen knowing all students will benefit.
“You didn’t want to do all those special, extra things to really flaunt the programs when you knew a bunch of kids were being left out,” he said.
Both Sterling and Fay praised the program’s destigmatizing effects on kids and argued the universal school meals keeps money in the pockets of middle class families who need it.
Essex Westford went from spending 2% of its nutrition budget on local food to 17%, or about $170,000, according to Fay, purchasing beef, apples, bakery goods and maple syrup locally. The Agency of Education estimates schools buy $2 million in local food, a figure that continues to grow.
Asked what would happen if the universal school meals were repealed this year, Fay said the district has already budgeted assuming the program will continue.
“It’s not like we can turn on a dime,” he said. “I need software; I need staff.”
But more than that, Fay opposes getting rid of a program he sees as bringing many benefits to kids: “I don’t want to be part of that.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Gov. Phil Scott’s plan to cut free school meals for all gets bipartisan pushback.