On Monday, a legislative committee plans to discuss a bill to make breakfast free for all public school students in Arkansas.
Perhaps the largest restaurant in the state of Arkansas is the Little Rock School District. Serving thousands of kids, breakfast and lunch, five days a week, nutritionist Stephanie Walker-Hynes says a lot of work goes into meal planning, because children, she says, “eat with their eyes.” The food has to look appealing.
“Because you don't want your tray to be bland,” she said. “You don't want to serve starchy vegetables all the time. And so we also want to make sure we have a variety and we are advancing the palate.”
Walker-Hynes works as the director of child nutrition for the district. She and the rest of our nation's school menu builders have to follow a lot of rules, handed down from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Every day, schools must offer a meal like a small food pyramid. The tray must have one protein, one grain, vegetables, fruit and a carton of milk. Walker-Hynes says there are also rules about colors.
“We have to have dark green vegetables weekly, a bean or legume weekly and of course a dark orange vegetable,” she said.
If kids aren't eating something, say the bean and cheese pupusa, the district won’t direct their cafeterias to keep making it. If something is popular like hamburgers, nachos, or the classic school lunch square pizza we all remember, they keep going.
For breakfast, the district often offers a mixture of cereals and something grain-based, like a burrito or an egg sandwich. Breakfast in other state public schools look pretty similar.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, about 200,000 kids statewide ate the school breakfast, about 50,000 to 100,000 more ate the lunch. During those years, there was a national law universalizing free school meals. Every kid regardless of their parents’ income could eat free of charge. And more kids used the program than ever.
This matters in a state with towering food insecurity, ranked this year as the hungriest state in the nation.
Now with the pandemic over, many kids still qualify for free or reduced meals, but some still have to pay. And that money, a few bucks a tray, can add up.
Walker-Hynes says sometimes parents protest the new policy.
“Principals will reach out to them and some of them will say ‘you fed the kids free for two years, keep feeding the kids free,’” she said. “But we're a not-for-profit. We are literally paycheck to paycheck month to month.”
All that unpaid lunch money accumulates into a pot of debt. For the LRSD it's $134,000, and statewide it's in the tens of millions of dollars. If you don't pay, there's not much the district can do except prevent you from walking at graduation, or reach out to groups that help clear lunch debt.
To combat the state hunger crisis, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders gave federal dollars to families to keep their kids fed over the summer. Then, at her annual State of the State Address, she ignited a surprising new policy.
“I'm announcing my plan to use medical marijuana money to make both this program and our free lunch and breakfast program financially sustainable for years to come,” she told the legislature.
The new law would not give kids free lunch, but it would give them free breakfast.
Why medical marijuana money? It’s because the legislature finished giving it to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and has been pushing to spend it on hunger.
Right now, the bill seems to have bipartisan support.
Rep. Tippi McCullough, D-Little Rock, is one of the legislation’s sponsors.
“As a teacher and coach for 33 years, there wasn't a time where I didn't have hungry students in the classroom,” she said. “Sure, I taught high school and I know teenagers are hungry, so I know often they want a snack or something. But this went beyond that.”
During her years teaching at rural, urban, public and private schools, McCullough kept food in a cabinet in case a student told her they were hungry.
“Just one more distraction taken away from what they have on their mind,” she said. “It's always been hard to be a kid, but particularly these days there are so many things to have on their mind.”
This piece of legislation builds on previous work to feed kids.
In 2019, Republican Sen. Andy Davis sponsored a law to give kids a “bill of rights” for school lunches. Schools were barred from turning kids away or “stigmatizing” them when they couldn’t afford the food.
Two years ago, a law sponsored by some of the same state legislators as this one, made lunches cheaper. But federal law dictates that schools still have to charge kids for meals.
Walker-Hynes, the LRSD nutritionist, says Arkansas as a state is headed in the right direction.
“We honor the state regulations instead of the federal regulations,” she said. “It's not a kid's fault they can't eat, so why would we penalize a kid?”
She hopes the state one day adopts free lunch too, but for now is very excited about a future of free breakfast.
The bill will be on the agenda during a legislative committee meeting Monday.
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