Thousands of Arizona Students Could Lose Access to Free Meals Under New Proposal
A looming federal budget proposal threatens to strip away free school meals from many students in Arizona. This initiative, known as the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), currently ensures that high-need schools can provide free breakfast and lunch to all students.
The potential policy shift could disqualify over 24,000 schools nationwide from participating in the program. According to the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), CEP is beneficial as it eliminates the administrative burden of processing individual meal forms and managing school meal debt. Instead, schools are reimbursed based on a calculated percentage of poverty within the school.
Under the current system, schools are eligible for CEP if 25% of their students benefit from programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). However, there is a proposal to increase this threshold to 60%.
Kyrstyn Paulat, director of early learning and education at Children’s Action Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group, highlighted the critical role school meals play in addressing food insecurity among children. “Obviously, if you are not well-fed and you don’t know when your next meal is going to be, that’s going to hinder your health and your academic performance,” Paulat stated.
Paulat further noted that this change could affect 366 schools and over 148,000 students just in Arizona. “There’s so much in the way of rising costs for families right now,” she expressed. “When we look at housing, when we look at groceries, when we look at childcare, all of these costs just keep adding up for our families and this would just be another additional expense to increase their grocery prices.”
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