Child hunger is soaring, but two months after Congress approved billions to replace school meals, only 15 percent of eligible children had received benefits.
As child hunger soars to levels without modern precedent, an emergency program Congress created two months ago has reached only a small fraction of the 30 million children it was intended to help.
The program, Pandemic-EBT, aims to compensate for the declining reach of school meals by placing their value on electronic cards that families can use in grocery stores. But collecting lunch lists from thousands of school districts, transferring them to often-outdated state computers and issuing specialized cards has proved much harder than envisioned, leaving millions of needy families waiting to buy food.
Congress approved the effort in mid-March as part of the Families First act, its first major coronavirus relief package. By May 15, only about 15 percent of eligible children had received benefits, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Just 12 states had started sending money, and Michigan and Rhode Island alone had finished.
The pace is accelerating, with millions of families expected to receive payments in the coming weeks. But 16 states still lack federal approval to begin the payments and Utah declined to participate, saying it did not have the administrative capacity to distribute the money. Many Southern states with high rates of child hunger have gotten a slow start.
As of May 15, states had issued payments for about 4.4 million children, out of the 30 million who potentially qualify, the Times analysis shows. If all states reached everyone eligible, an unlikely prospect, families could receive as much as $10 billion.
“The program’s going to be very important, but it hasn’t been fast,” said Duke Storen, a former nutrition advocate who leads the Virginia Department of Social Services, which began sending money last week. “The intent is to replace lost meals at school, but the meals have been lost for months, and few benefits have gone out.”
Among pandemic-related hardship, child hunger stands out for its urgency and symbolic resonance — after decades of exposés and reforms, a country of vast wealth still struggles to feed its young. So vital are school meals in some places, states are issuing replacement benefits in waves to keep grocers from being overwhelmed.
The lag between congressional action and families buying food is, in many places, less a story of bureaucratic indifference than a testament to the convoluted nature of the American safety net.
Many officials have worked overtime to start the program amid competing crises. Yet even in delivering a benefit as simple as a school meal, federal, state and local governments can all add delays, as can the private companies that print the cards, which can only buy food. Read More
In some communities and neighborhood school lunches provided children from low-income families with two meals a day--breakfast and lunch. They met a large part of a child's nutritional requirements for the day. While some low-income families receive SNAP, this does not guarantee that children will be fed. For a number of reasons a low-income family may still have difficulty in putting food on the table. In rural communities inadequate or no transportation can limit how often a low-income family is able to purchase food. Low-income families may live more than 10 miles from a supermarket, placing them in a rural food desert. A number of inner city neighborhoods are located in urban food deserts. Low-income families living in these neighborhoods may also lack access to adequate transportation. This article points to a number of needs that local churches and local associations or networks of churches might play a role in meeting. Local churches and local associations or networks of churches can also play an important role as advocates for children with Congress and their state legislature as well as the federal, state, and local government. Being pro-life involves more than protecting the unborn.
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