All school-age kids in Vermont will eat for free another year, thanks to pandemic-era waivers the U.S. Department of Agriculture has opted to extend through June 2022.
That’s good news for the state’s roughly 80,000 public school students — and for its lawmakers, who now have extra time to figure out if they’re willing to pay for universal meals once the federal waivers expire.
The USDA announced the move earlier this week, but confusion remained in Vermont about what it would mean for schools. Rosie Krueger, director of child nutrition programs at the state Agency of Education, said Friday that while the state was fairly confident the federal government intended to allow schools to offer free meals for all, it was still seeking clarification about whether school districts would then be fully reimbursed by the USDA.
“Before we go out there and tell everybody — all the families and all the schools — that yes, no problem, meals are free for everyone, we want to be 100% confident of that,” she said.
Matt Herrick, a spokesperson for the USDA, wrote in an email that he would be contacting the state to “clear up any confusion.”
“Yes, Vermont schools will be able to continue to serve meals at no cost to all children next school year,” he said. According to Herrick, districts will be reimbursed using rates set for the federal summer food service program, which are higher than what schools usually receive for their regular school-year meal programs.
The state’s K-12 schools have been providing universal meals since 2020, when the federal government promised to pick up the tab. At the time, the feds enacted a series of waivers allowing districts to provide meals to all children — no questions asked — using a variety of new methods, including bus delivery and pick-up sites. Before this latest announcement, those waivers were set to expire in September.
Anti-hunger advocates in Vermont hoped to capitalize on the moment to push through legislation that would make such reforms permanent. But a bill in the state Senate aiming to do just that is still in limbo as lawmakers wrestle with the price tag.
The bill, S.100, has been trimmed back to only include free breakfast, at a cost of about $8 million a year. It would also assign a task force to come up with a way to pay for free breakfast and lunch for all by the 2026-27 school year. (An incentive program to encourage schools to buy their food locally, once attached to S.100, has been slipped into the state’s omnibus budget bill.)
One champion of the universal meals measure, Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, told her colleagues in the Senate Finance Committee on Friday that lawmakers might consider pushing the bill’s effective date back by a year — given the federal government’s announcement — to give schools even more time to prepare.
“I’m hoping we can move forward with something,” she said.
And maybe, replied Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, the committee’s chair, “the feds will make it permanent.”
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Thanks to the feds, all Vermont students will eat for free again next school year - vtdigger.org
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