Harrisburg      Believe it or not, children and their parents are already getting ready for school with classes right around the corner.  The days when summer lasted until Labor Day are long gone in many districts with classes starting in August.  There are always surprises in store, but this year there’s also something new in many districts, especially poorer ones.  In another punishing gift from the Trump administration and the war on the poor in the Big Bad Budget Bill, for many students this will be the end of free school lunches.

One feature of the bill forces schools to recertify families for free or reduced-price lunches.  According to the Food Research and Action Center,

During the 2025–2026 school year, a record 55,362 schools offered breakfast and lunch to all their students through the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), according to The Community Eligibility: The Key to Hunger-Free Schools, School Year 2025–2026 report. A federal option allows high-need schools and school districts to offer breakfast and lunch to all students at no charge. This year…27.6 million children attended a CEP school, 386,019 more than the previous year.  Schools directly certify children who participate in SNAP for free school meals, which helps determine whether a school qualifies for CEP and how much federal reimbursement it receives. As SNAP participation drops dramatically due to the cuts, and fewer children are directly certified, schools may lose eligibility for CEP or find that it is no longer financially viable to participate.

In Arizona, as one example, where this year half of SNAP recipients have been forced off the program, around 450,000, it’s easy to imagine that few schools will have sufficient numbers to qualify for full CEP coverage.  Worse, because they are no lower certified for food stamps, despite being eligible, some school districts may not have the independent ability to certify their income or will simply automatically disqualify some children.  Some children and families may not be willing to participate because of the returning stigma of free and reduced-price breakfasts and lunches because where they were not singled out, when meals were offered to all children, their situation will not be obvious.

Not that the White House cares, but this also means that the progress in reducing hunger in the United States will go backwards, especially for children.  The parents are being punished by being booted off the program, while the children might have at least had a couple of good, solid meals while at school, those meals could be gone as well.

With funding cutbacks in education as well and the Department of Education downsizing to somewhere between irrelevance and non-existence, who believes that the schools have the resources and personnel to manage all of these recertifications now required to continue to receive federal funds?

Shame!  Shame!