Like so many other federal food and agriculture programs, the U.S. school lunch program had its origins in President Franklin Roosevelt’s First 100 Days legislative blitz to help Americans recover from the Great Depression of the 1930’s. In order to make the best use of the surplus food commodities procured by the government under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and Section 32 of the Act of August 24, 1935, some of these commodities were provided for use in early school lunch programs. In addition, resources from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) were used to obtain and install kitchen equipment to prepare the food for serving to kids while they were in school. In 1939, these resources were in place in more than 14,000 school districts, serving 900,000 children.
A formally authorized school lunch program was established in 1946 in the wake of a study and press reports about the poor nutritional status of many young men in the United States, affecting their fitness for military service during World War II. President Harry Truman cited such a study in signing the legislation, which created a national program to be overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) but delivered by state and local agencies.
The national school lunch program, and its complementary program which offers students access to breakfast when they arrive at school in the morning, have seen fairly stable participation over the last few decades. According to data maintained by USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), 29.6 million children participated in the school lunch program at some point during fiscal year 2024, down slightly from the FY22 peak of 31 million but identical to the pre-pandemic FY2019 level of 29.6 million children.
The school breakfast program, which started as a limited pilot program in 1969, had 15.6 million children participating in it as of FY24. The overall participation figures for this program are lower because not as many school districts around the country provide this opportunity for their students as they do for school lunch.
Both programs are available to all students attending schools in districts where offered, and a significant share of those students are eligible to receive these benefits either for free or reduced charges due to the low-income status of the households they reside in. In recent years, the share of students receiving free or reduced price meals nationally has been in the 70 to 77 percent range, except for FY21 and FY22, when temporary rules allowed school districts to provide free lunches to the entire student body regardless of income eligibility due to the effects of COVID-19.
These programs, as well as a few others, such as the Special and Supplemental Program Women, Infants and Children (also known as WIC) are typically reauthorized every five years to allow Congress to respond to perceived weaknesses and problems with the programs’ operations. The last time Congress passed a child nutrition reauthorization bill was in 2010, in the form of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which included extensive provisions aimed at improving the nutritional content of meals served under these programs based on recommendations from Technically, that legislation expired in 2015, but the two Congressional Committees with jurisdiction over these programs, the Senate Agriculture Committee and the House Education and the Workforce Committee, have not passed a new reauthorization to replace the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act yet after more than eight years.
One problem that has arisen in recent years is that an increasing number of school districts have students who do not qualify for free lunch based on their family’s income, but have been unable to keep up with paying for the school meals that they eat on a regular basis. According to a report issued last November by the Education Data Initiative, U.S. school districts collectively have tallied $178 million annually in unpaid school meal debts in recent years by their students, an issue faced by nearly 90 percent of the school districts surveyed for this study, affecting millions of children.
Federal law bans school districts from paying off meal debts using federal child nutrition funds, they must be written off as an operating loss. Schools may look to state, local, or charitable sources to try to offset the meal debt. .There are some local non-profits that have been set up in recent years to help tackle this issue, but no organization is yet addressing it on a national basis despite its scope.
Some school districts have sought to shame the students caught up in this dilemma by denying them access to regular school meals, and giving them separate minimal meals such as cold cheese or peanut butter sandwiches until the debt is paid off. You can read more about this issue in this 2023 article in the Georgetown Law Review.
In response to this problem, the U.S. Department of Agriculture promulgated a new rule in 2023 lowering the threshold for school districts to qualify for the Community Eligibility Program (CEP), allowing schools with at least 25 percent of their students living in poverty to provide free lunches to all the students–the previous threshold had been 40 percent.
Unfortunately, this relief for these families previously affected by school lunch debt may be short-lived. In an effort to find budgetary offsets for President Trump’s desired tax cut package for later this year, a group of House Republicans have identified the CEP provision as a potential source of savings, if the threshold were to be raised to 60 percent. Such a change would push as many as 12 million school children receiving free school meals under the current CEP poverty threshold would likely lose that benefit and put at least some of their families at risk of piling up school meal debt once again. The House Budget Committee majority staff have estimated that this change, as well as enforcing more burdensome paperwork requirements on eligible families who apply for free school meals, would save $12 billion over ten years.
