Feb 4, 2023 3 min read

We’ve heard time and again over the years that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, which roughly means that there’s no reward without effort.

That’s fair enough. But, in reality, there should be a free lunch — at least for students in our public schools.

And there was in the two years after the COVID-19 pandemic descended on the United States and other parts of the world. But a federal program that guaranteed free meals to K-12 students across the country, with no questions asked, came to an end with the 2022-23 academic year. As was the case before the pandemic, students can qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, but those students and their families must run a gauntlet of paperwork and qualification rules. To fully comprehend how porous the American safety net is, a family of four must make below $36,000 per year in order to qualify for a free meal, and just above $51,000 to qualify for a reduced-price meal. Because of inflation that has seen food prices rocket past wage gains, more families are struggling to pay for meals at schools and are racking up debt.

There’s got to be a better way.

The simplest, most constructive and most compassionate solution would be making free school meals permanent. It would end the need for a cumbersome bureaucracy dedicated to scrutinizing pay stubs and collecting debt. It would also boost student health and educational outcomes, reduce childhood obesity and decrease behavioral problems. Some states are taking the initiative to provide free meals for students despite the expiration of the federal program: California and Maine have instituted their own programs; Vermont, Massachusetts and Nevada extended universal free meals through this school year; and Colorado is pulling together a plan to tax wealthier residents in order to support a $100 million free-meal program.

In September, then-Gov. Tom Wolf extended a free breakfast program through this school year. Without it, officials estimated that 16% of children in Pennsylvania would be arriving in classrooms in the morning with an empty stomach. State Sen. Lindsey Williams and Rep. Emily Kinkead, two Allegheny County Democrats, have introduced legislation that would create a permanent free meals program in the commonwealth. Kinkead explained, “This has been such an obvious fix that we need to be addressing, because investing in our kids has been shown over and over and over again to be one of the best methods to have a massive return on investment…”

The proposal has the support of the School Nutrition Association of Pennsylvania. Across the country, free meals at schools has overwhelming support — 74% of voters, according to one poll, and 90% of parents. With those kinds of numbers, the support clearly stretches across political, demographic and socioeconomic lines.

Kinkead said, “We have a responsibility to kids in our schools. When they’re under our care, we have to care for them.”

That responsibility should include making sure they are not hungry.