NC lawmakers OK paying for school lunches for thousands of lower-income students
Updated July 2
The state will pick up the school lunch tab for tens of thousands of lower-income North Carolina students when schools reopen next school year.
State lawmakers unanimously passed last week a $500 million coronavirus relief bill that includes $3.9 million to cover the 40 cents per lunch charged to students who qualify for a reduced price under the federal school lunch program.
The legislation also requires the state Department of Public Instruction to study how much unpaid student meal debt exists across the state and how much of it is from students who qualify for reduced-price meals.
Gov. Roy Cooper announced Wednesday he had signed House Bill 1023 into law.
More than 60,000 students across the state qualified for a reduced-price lunch in the 2017-18 school year. Under federal income guidelines, that works out for a family of four to be an annual household income of between $33,475 and $47,638.
“Eliminating the reduced-price lunch copay is a great step in ensuring all students are fed,” Morgan Wittman Gramann, executive director of the North Carolina Alliance for Health, said in a statement. “We appreciate School Nutrition Program staff, and the additional funding provided to School Nutrition Programs in H1023 is critical to allowing them to make the changes necessary to continue to feed our kids during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Wittman Gramann singled out the work of Sen. Brent Jackson, a Sampson County Republican, and Rep. Jason Saine, a Lincoln County Republican, in getting the lunch portion passed.
Legislation targets school lunch shaming
Jackson pushed for the lunch provision after hearing that some schools provide students with less nutritional alternatives if they have unpaid meal bills, the News & Observer previously reported. Jackson said he wanted to reduce instances of school lunch shaming.
The provision to pay for school lunches was included last year in the state budget adopted by the Republican-led General Assembly. But Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed the budget due to the lack of Medicaid expansion and what he said were insufficient raises for teachers.
Most of the funding for House Bill 1023 comes from federal coronavirus relief funding. But the money to cover the school lunches would come from the state’s fund to replace aging school buses.
Other education items in the coronavirus bill include:
▪ Allows $75 million in federal relief funding to be used for school summer nutrition programs.
▪ Provides $7 million to give to schools to buy personal protective equipment to help with the pandemic.
▪ Provides $5 million to schools to help with exceptional children who lost services during the closure.
The legislation also provides money for hospitals, health clinics, group homes, child advocacy center and domestic violence prevention programs.
“This powerful public health and economic relief will reach North Carolina communities directly while we continue to reserve federal funding for an uncertain future as our state faces a $5 billion revenue shortfall from the economic shutdown,” Reps. Saine and Donny Lambeth, a Forsyth County Republican, said in a press release.
This story was originally published June 29, 2020 at 10:36 AM.
