16 Million Hungry Kids, 1 New Idea for Feeding Them
WASHINGTON (Aug. 23) -- Acknowledging that the hunger faced by millions of American students during the summertime is "a catastrophe," the top nutrition official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture wants to experiment with a totally new approach to feeding poor kids during the months they have no access to subsidized meals at school cafeterias.
The idea: issue a seasonal electronic benefits card to families whose children are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches during the academic year.
In an interview with AOL News, Undersecretary for Food and Nutrition Kevin Concannon said the department has recently asked states to volunteer for a pilot project for the cards during the summer of 2011.
In participating states, the card would complement or replace a patchwork of summer food programs that reach only one in five of the children who qualify for subsidized school meals.
"We want to try it just to see if it can work out," Concannon said.
He expects that benefits would be paid in about the same amounts that the U.S. government pays to reimburse the organizations that run feeding sites during the three-month break.
AOL News reported in June that an estimated 16 million children would face a summer of hunger this year. The recession has led to an increase in the number of needy students -- a record 20.5 million were eligible for subsidized school lunches at the end of the last school year. But it also caused big cuts to summer school budgets and a drop in donations to food banks and private organizations that step in and serve meals during vacation months. Even a concerted effort to increase the 3.3 million meals served in 2009 was not going to make a dent in the problem, experts said.
"I read the article. We like to think about the good news. But it's a serious challenge," Concannon said. "We need to do more about this catastrophe."
"We Need to Reach Far More Children"
Only 8 percent of the nation's 20,000 school districts continue serving meals during the summer. For 25 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has tried to close the gap by sending money for summer meals through an ungainly system run by local governments and nonprofit groups. The local organizations provide the meals and get reimbursed by the state government, which in turn receives federal payments. Overall, the assistance reaches only one in five eligible children nationwide.
State by state, the ability to get nutrition to poor children varied wildly during last year's school vacation. Twelve states, along with Guam and Puerto Rico, each fed fewer than one in 10 poor children, an AOL News analysis showed. Only New Mexico, New York and the District of Columbia managed to feed more than one-third of the children who had received subsidized lunches during the school year.
In January, Congress gave the USDA $85 million to help strengthen the system. This summer, Mississippi, which reaches just 7.9 percent of eligible children during the summer, used federal funds to add enrichment activities designed to attract children to feeding centers. Arkansas, with a participation rate of 10.6 percent, tried to help some of the summer sites stay open for a longer portion of the vacation. With autumn still a few weeks off, Concannon said, "it's too early for us to draw conclusions for either one of those."
Some local groups tried innovative tactics with private help. Catholic Charities in Chicago and Central Dallas Ministries, for instance, partnered with PepsiCo to shuttle summer lunches to poor children at parks and recreation centers. Concannon said the USDA waived a federal "stormy weather" requirement to provide some sort of shelter at each site.
Larry James, the Dallas ministries' president and CEO, said it took some doing to comply with the various federal regulations. Children must stay at the feeding location with their food, to make sure they don't turn over the lunches to someone else. The ministries' volunteers stayed for 90 minutes at each stop, and "we spent a lot of time keeping kids on-site," James said.
A little probing by the ministries uncovered what was wrong: Children and their parents were scared. Some of the parks where food was served had a reputation for crime. The ministries asked the police for help. "This benefited the families, who knew the children had protection. And it benefited the image of the police too," James said.
Despite that extra effort, however, the vast majority of the city's poor students were left to find food some other way. According to James, the ministries fed more than 16,000 children -- but that's out of more than 300,000 who were eligible.
While Concannon applauds the successful local programs and said he's hoping to encourage more, he is frustrated by the persistence of the overall summer hunger problem. While the figures for this year won't be ready until January, he said he's sure of one thing: "We haven't solved the huge gap.
"The program increases are incremental and gradual," he added. "We're not going to get all 20 million right away. But we need to reach far more children."
"It Doesn't Happen Overnight"
The electronic cards that will be tested next summer pose challenges of their own. The biggest is how to ensure that the benefits actually go to students. "That's why we're trying a pilot," Concannon said.
Food stamps and aid to women with young infants already come in the form of electronic benefits. School-age children in the vast majority of those families would also be eligible for summer meal funds, which could be loaded onto the card.
James noted that cards could have the added advantage of pumping money into a poor neighborhood. "If it goes to grocery stores instead of a nonprofit, think of the economic impact," he said. He thinks the concept "is really cool."
Jodi Risse is the director of food and nutrition for Anne Arundel County, Md., which last year served 15,000 meals over 20 summer days -- a daily average of just 750 students. During the school year, Anne Arundel served free or discount lunches to more than 19,000 students a day. The county more than doubled the number of feeding sites this summer, from seven to 16.
Electronic cards, she told AOL News, would be a good complement to the programs already in place.
"The access to the families and students over the summer really needs to grow," she said. "It doesn't happen overnight, that's the hard part."
The original AOL News report on summer hunger led to a national debate over the government's role in feeding poor kids when school is out. Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh skewered the notion, joking that children should look in the cupboards at home, buy cheap meals at McDonald's or do a little Dumpster diving. Limbaugh, in turn, was criticized in such publications as The Huffington Post and the Riverfront Times, an alternative paper in St. Louis.
Concannon said he hadn't heard the Limbaugh broadcast, but he wasn't amused.
"It's not something to make light of," he said. "One of our defense mechanisms is denial. But as much as we have unlimited capacity to grow and provide food in this country, we still have people in our midst who suffer."
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/usda-to-try-new-summer-system-for-feeding-poor-students/19598805
No comments:
Post a Comment