When School Lunch Funding Expires, Will Kids Go Hungry?

UPDATE 12/02/10: The House voted in favor of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, ushering in school lunch reform. The move came after more than 15,000 Change.org members signed a petition supporting the Child Nutrition Act and more than 1,000 members urged Congress to reform school lunch without cutting future funds to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps.  While the bill still includes SNAP cuts, President Obama and Congressional leaders have promised to fix these reductions. Read the full story here.

For the past several months, the House and Senate have gone back and forth with their various school lunch reform bills that would reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act, legislation that funds federal free and reduced-cost lunches. Now here we are on the eve before the day the Child Nutrition Act expires, and there's still no resolution to this dining dilemma.

The Child Nutrition Act expires September 30th, which means that funding for school lunch would disappear. Don't worry, though, lawmakers would be in for a world of hurt if they let kids go hungry. What will likely happen is that they'll pass some sort of continuance that will keep the dough flowing (well, OK, more like trickling) for school lunch programs. But what's less clear is whether school lunch will get its much-needed makeover.

Back in August, the Senate passed its version of the school lunch reform bill, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. In order to become law, the House needs to pass its version of the bill, the Improving Nutrition for America's Children Act. The two bills would theoretically get conferenced and then signed into law by President Obama.

However, the House is stuck. Proposed school lunch reform legislation is relatively modest, but it would push cafeteria dining in a positive direction by upping nutritional standards for meals, serving more fruits and veggies and whole grains, allowing more students to partake in free and reduced-cost lunches, and implementing farm-to-school initiatives. How the bill plans to pay for this reform, though, is what's causing so much controversy in getting the legislation passed.

The bill the House is considering would pay for school lunch by cutting funds for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (S.N.A.P.), otherwise known as food stamps. Right now, about 41 million people use food stamps in the U.S., with children constituting nearly half of those users. A bill that cuts S.N.A.P. benefits to pay for free and reduced-cost lunches is basically robbing the poor to give to the poor.

What's really frustrating is that this is a case where we really can't have an either-or scenario: American kids need both school lunch reform and food stamps in order to eat healthy, nutritious meals. You can't cut lunch in order to pay for dinner, or vice-versa.

Let's hope lawmakers can come up with a creative solution that will ensure that kids stay fed inside and outside of school. In the meantime, you can lend your support to school lunch reform by signing our petition asking Congress to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act.

Photo credit: Lara604 via Flickr