DAVID MAMARIL HOROWITZ

david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com

Proposed federal cuts to safety net programs would reduce federal funding for meals that school districts serve kids nationwide, according to policy analysts — and students in Bowling Green are no exception, confirmed Dalla Emerson, the food service operations director at city schools.

Students directly qualify for meals at no cost based on if their household is designated as low income, Emerson said. Households enrolled in safety net programs, such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, automatically qualify their children.

Because millions are anticipated to lose access to safety net programs nationwide, many students who access free meals through this direct qualification are, in turn, expected to lose that meal access — but the impacts are far broader.

When one family no longer directly qualifies for free meals, it also significantly reduces federal meal funding for other families at the rest of the school, according to Emerson and Jordan Ojile, advocacy coordinator at the nonprofit Feeding Kentucky.

Public school cafeterias, including BGISD’s, typically run on slim margins, according to Emerson and Ojile. This makes federal reductions difficult, and potentially impossible, to compensate for — and risks a reduction of free meals for students, according to the two.

Such changes would intersect with widespread hunger among youth statewide, as one in five children are food insecure across the 42-county service area of Feeding America Kentucky’s Heartland, according to the nonprofit.

Proponents of the federal budget bill, which is working its way through the Senate as of Friday, contend the cuts prioritize funding for the most vulnerable by preventing abuse and fraud. Opponents argue the cuts, which are anticipated to remove millions from Medicaid and SNAP, will have the opposite effect because people would fall through the cracks as they attempt, by the millions, to meet programs’ expanded requirements — with federally funded school meals being one among the many safety nets facing substantial risk.

“Why is food the hill we die upon when we fund transportation, we fund the classroom, we require students to be in school, and when they don’t show up, we go after the parents with truancy?” Emerson said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Adriene Whittaker, a single mother whose two girls at Bowling Green High School benefit from subsidized school meals, said that if they were cut, she’d likely need a second job to feed them. And, overseeing the T.C. Cherry Elementary cafeteria as a manager, she sees the benefits school meals provide kids daily.

“Three meals don’t just help children — they support families,” she said. “It also reduces stress at home and ensures each child has a fair chance to grow, learn and thrive. It’s not just about food — it’s about giving our kids the chance that they need.

“No child should have to learn on an empty stomach.”

CEP threats

The broader impacts would affect those who become eligible for free meals not through direct qualification — but rather through a separate national program.

This program, the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), requires a school or district to have at least 25% of its students directly qualify for free school meals — and it makes those meals accessible to all students at qualifying schools or districts. More than 92% of Kentucky schools were eligible for CEP in 2023, according to Feeding Kentucky and Kentucky Economic Policy.

The exact percentage of students who directly qualify for school meals at no cost — those on a safety net such as Medicaid or SNAP — is doubly important for CEP.

This is because federal funds don’t reimburse the entirety of CEP meals, Emerson and Ojile said. Instead, that percentage of directly qualifying students, multiplied by 1.6, determines how much federal reimbursement a CEP school or district gets per meal, according to the two.

For example, about 56% of BGISD students were directly eligible in the 2023-24 school year — meaning that it was fully reimbursed for roughly 90% of its $4.43 meals, while the remaining 10.35% were reimbursed at 42 cents apiece, Emerson has said.

So, every student whose household loses its safety net programs — and with them, direct qualification for free meals — reduces that CEP reimbursement rate, Emerson said. This is why, with the tight budgets public schools typically run on, BGISD would be hard pressed, and potentially unable, to cover all losses from federal cuts — which would threaten to reduce kids’ access to free meals, she said.

Given the anticipated drop in federal funding for CEP, children who don’t directly qualify for free school meals but access them through CEP are particularly at risk, Emerson said. The families she worries for most are those whose incomes are only slightly too high to directly qualify for free meals.

Sustaining meals offered to kids across an entire school through CEP is financially costly, Ojile added. Acquiring reimbursements for 80% of meals is widely considered a break-even rate — and Feeding Kentucky anticipates some schools will end CEP as they’re required to balance their budgets, he said.

Separately, entire schools would lose CEP if the direct qualification rate dips below 25% — and there’s concern on the horizon of an upcoming federal push to raise the qualifying percentage to 60%, which would kick most schools off CEP in the U.S., Ojile said. He expects it’ll be discussed as early as this fall, around the time Congress is discussing the Farm Bill, Ojile said.

And, CEP alleviates a school’s administrative burden of vetting hundreds, if not thousands, of applications for subsidized school meals, Ojile said. This is because it enables school nutrition directors to certify an entire student body based off the percentage of students who directly qualify for free school meals.

“We could focus on feeding kids healthy meals instead of paperwork,” Emerson summed up.

Opponents of CEP and those who advocate to limit it, such as the Heritage Foundation, contend that resources should be wisely spent and go to the truly needy, rather than all students. Supporters of CEP, and those who support expanding it, argue that making sure children stay fed is a top priority, and doing so also benefits states financially.

“We cannot afford food insecurity,” Ojile said. “(It) costs the state tens of millions of dollars in bad healthcare outcomes, in poor educational achievement, in a number of intersecting ways. Food insecurity is one of the most upstream problems that feeds into so many other issues.”