Photos: YouTube
No child chooses to go to bed and wake up and go to school hungry. As students across the country begin a new school year, children in California are returning to some very good news: California is now the first state to provide free school meals to all students. This means every child in California will now have a better chance at the healthy start and head start all children deserve. It is a shining example of moral leadership to end child poverty, and other states must follow suit before nationwide child nutrition waivers expire.
Child nutrition programs help our nation’s children get the food they need to learn, grow, and thrive, especially children in low-income households. The largest programs, the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program, provide nutritionally balanced, free, and low-cost meals to millions of children each day at school. But the long-standing problems of limited access, low reimbursements, lunch debt, and the stigmatization of children having to prove they are hungry and worthy of meals means millions of children lose out.
Enter universal school meals—an intervention we know works. Research shows access to universal school meals boosts students’ attendance and improves academic performance and health outcomes. Providing healthy school meals for all children eliminates stigma associated with school meals and practices like “lunch shaming,” using embarrassing public reminders or tactics like giving children cold bread and cheese instead of a hot meal when their lunch accounts are low. Universal school meals are also an essential way to reduce longstanding and widening racial disparities in nutrition, health, and education.
Hungry child,
I didn’t make this world for you.
You didn’t buy any stock in my railroad.
You didn’t invest in my corporation.
Where are your shares in standard oil?
I made the world for the rich
And the will-be-rich
And the have-always-been-rich.
Not for you,
Hungry child.
— Langston Hughes, “God to Hungry Child”
Marian Wright Edelman is Founder and President Emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to childrensdefense.org.
