Students eat lunch at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in South Salt Lake on Tuesday, March 12, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
A universal school meal program for Utah kids, with a price tag of $160 million, was held in the Senate Education Committee Thursday morning, though there are plans to work on the bill during the summer.
SB173 would have automatically enrolled students attending Utah public schools into a free meal program and given parents the option to opt out.
Sen. Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, presented the program as an investment in the future workforce of Utah. She also compared it to Utah’s Economic Development Tax Increment Financing tax credit program, which can provide tax credits of up to 30% to Utah companies if they meet performance goals, according to the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity.
“I think we should be investing in our children that will be the next workforce for these companies to succeed,” Escamilla said. “Findings show that school meal programs really yield substantial benefits — an estimated $9 of return for every dollar … when we invest in school meal programs.”
Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, said teachers can’t force a kid to learn on an empty stomach.
“We really need to start talking about, as a state, how we are going to invest in the kids of America or in Utah because we can’t move forward with them being hungry,” she said.
Some lawmakers were unwilling to swallow the bill’s $160 million fiscal note, which, Escamilla clarified, would not account for parents who choose to pay for their children’s meals, and what would happen if the federal government pulled funding from the national programs.
Sen. John Johnson, R-Ogden, said he had a hard time believing his neighbors would need a universal meal program, and said he would support another bill by Rep. Tyler Clancy, R-Provo, that would provide free breakfast and lunch to students who qualify for reduced-price meals based on household size and income levels under the School Breakfast Program and National School Lunch Program.
“I think the general tendency is to let government pay for whatever government will pay for, and personally, I don’t think that’s fair to taxpayers,” he said. “I could certainly support the bill coming in that basically tries to deal with kids that truly, even though they’re on a reduced fee lunch, the families don’t have the means to pay for that.”
Escamilla acknowledged the policy questions and said she would consider them as she worked on the bill during the interim, but said children should not have to wonder where their next meal would come from.
“We’re also seeing some instances where certain families, like middle-class working families, struggle for whatever situation, whether they’re a paycheck away from homelessness or catastrophic illness and now they don’t have money,” she said. “That burden shouldn’t be on a child that is trying to learn.”
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