Reprinted from Mike Malloy Website
I don't get it. Why would any politician want to be responsible for punishing poor kids for being poor? Where's the gain for them? I guess they just want to reserve the federal funding for more important items... Like bombs and drones.
When they're scanning the budget for areas to trim -- why is it the kids? Or the poor? Without fancy lobbyists advocating for them, they are unimportant.
Think Progress has this:
"The measure would reverse years of progress on free meals in U.S. schools by setting a much higher eligibility bar for schools to start making meals free to all students. Thousands of schools have expanded their meal offerings in recent years as researchers expose the extent of child hunger -- and the dividends that come from curing it inside schoolhouses.
"The changes would take away schoolwide free meals programs from more than 7,000 schools that educate almost 3.4 million students in low-income areas, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports. Another 11,600 schools that have not yet taken advantage of the free meals option for all students would lose access to it under the proposal.
"The proposal would change the definition of how poor a school district has to be before it can skip the paperwork and feed all of its students. Currently a school qualifies for community eligibility if 40 percent of its students are automatically qualified for free school meals based on their participation in another anti-poverty program. The GOP draft measure would raise that threshold to 60 percent.
"Those threshold percentages are not hard-and-fast stand-ins for what share of a student body is poor enough to qualify for free meals. Automatically-qualified students are only a sub-set of the need population here, the CBPP emphasizes. Hunger experts' rule of thumb holds that for every two students auto-enrolled in free meal programs, there's another classmate who would qualify if she applied. As the CBPP puts it, "Schools in which 40 percent to 60 percent of students are identified as automatically eligible for free meals typically have 64 percent to 96 percent of their students approved for free or reduced-price meals....
"This GOP proposal would therefore hit schools where roughly 19 out of every 20 students likely qualifies for free meals. Yanking away cost- and time-saving schoolwide eligibility from such districts would not only chomp into their meager budgets. It would create hungry kids where there don't need to be any."