99 | Understanding Why More Eligible Kids Got Free Meals During Pandemic Summers

Leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, only about one in every seven students served by the National School Lunch Program also participated in free summer meals programs provided by the federal Food and Nutrition Service. The low ratio of students accessing meals in the summer compared to the school year has been dubbed the “summer food gap.” Policymakers and anti-hunger advocates have long worried that millions of children from households with low incomes aren’t getting enough to eat when school is out of session, posing risks to children’s health, learning, and overall well-being. This episode of On the Evidence examines what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic when the federal government temporarily waived some of its program rules, giving meal providers much more flexibility in how they fed students during the school year and in the summer months. With the waivers in place, program operators could prioritize convenience for families and avoid the spread of infection. For example, parents or guardians could pick up meals for their children at the curb or a drive-through; they could grab more than one meal at a time; and they could pick up the meals outside of traditional service hours, such as in the early mornings or evenings. The waivers also cleared the way for more summer meals sites to open, which helped establish new sites closer to where some families lived. Recent research from the Food and Nutrition Service and Mathematica shows that in 2020, with temporary program waivers in place because of the pandemic, these federal summer meals programs reached many more children and served many more meals than usual. The podcast examines why access to meals improved in the summer of 2020 and what it could mean for summer meal access now that COVID-19 is no longer a public health emergency, and those temporary waivers have ended. The episode features three guests: Shana Christrup, Lindsay Aguilar, and Veronica Severn. Christrup is the public health director for the Bipartisan Policy Center, which released a report in January 2022 that recommended changes to federal child nutrition programs, including changes that would expand access to meals in the summer. Aguilar is the food services director for the Tucson Unified School District. Severn is a survey researcher at Mathematica who coauthored the recent report on the pandemic-era waivers for child nutrition programs in the spring and summer of 2020. Read the report from the Food and Nutrition Service and Mathematica on child nutrition program operations from March through September 2020: https://smo-study.mathematica.org/ Read the report from the Bipartisan Policy Center on strengthening child nutrition programs: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/child-nutrition-programs/ Read Route Fifty’s story on lessons from the pandemic about feeding more children during the summer: https://www.route-fifty.com/health-human-services/2023/06/federal-covid-changes-helped-feed-twice-many-kids-during-summer/387158/