Parents the Texas Department of Agriculture Is Again Offering Free Meals This Summer
Editor's notation: This is the first of a two-part series well-nigh the failing participation in Texas' summer meals programs for students. You can read the 2d part here.
When Evelyn Delgado saw a banner outside her daughter'south Houston school advertising costless breakfasts and lunches this June, she figured it was an opportunity to requite her 7-twelvemonth-old good food and a chance to get out of the house.
Delgado used to work at a local Fiesta Mart and leave her ii kids with a babysitter, earlier she realized that paying the sitter was eating up her paltry wages. Now a stay-at-home mom with a husband who works in maintenance, she said the summertime program helps feed her kids, who are eligible for free meals during the school year.
"We went [to the school for meals] the whole time," she said. "As long as they don't shut it downward, I think information technology's doing dandy."
But Delgado's girl is amid a shrinking number of students who participate in federally funded summer meals programs beyond the country. Texas missed out on nigh $56 million in federal money in 2016 — more than any other state — because it could not depict enough hungry kids to its summer meals programs, which are available to kids who qualify for gratuitous or subsidized meals.
In 2011, the land passed a law requiring schoolhouse districts to offer complimentary meals to students for at least 30 days during the summer intermission, if at to the lowest degree 50 pct of their students are eligible for free and reduced school lunches. The free meals are available to any student, regardless of whether they're enrolled in the district.
After peaking in 2013 at around 280,000 students per solar day, concluding summer Texas' participation rate took a big plunge: The average number of Texas kids served meals each day in July 2016 was 20 percent lower than the previous July, and the land dropped from 39th to 48th in a national ranking of such summertime programs, co-ordinate to a recent report from the nonprofit Food Research and Activity Center.
Yet the boilerplate daily number of Texas kids who can't beget meals during the school yr increased slightly to 2.4 million between 2015 and 2016.
"Information technology is disappointing, to be honest, given the extensive statewide efforts to promote participation," said Erin Nolen, assistant director of research at the Texas Hunger Initiative, a nonprofit that partners with the country to support summertime meals sponsors.
Why is participation dropping?
No one knows exactly why fewer kids are taking advantage of gratis summer meals, but there are many hypotheses. I reason cited by schoolhouse districts is state and local budget cuts, which accept caused some districts to scaleback summer programs similar sports or tutoring that concenter students to their campuses.
Kids who come to school for those programs are more likely to take advantage of summertime meals. That helps gainsay a trouble that accompanies hunger during the summer, especially for depression-income kids: the "summertime slide." Studies show low-income students are more than probable to lose a few months of reading skills during the summertime, falling behind their higher-income peers.
To salvage money because of a tight budget final twelvemonth, El Paso ISD cutting the number of summer meal sites at its schools. The large border school district served most 20,000 fewer lunches from June through August 2016 than the twelvemonth before, co-ordinate to country data. This year, the district cut back on its July summer enrichment programs at several campuses, which meant fewer students being bused to the schools.
"If you take programs and kids are busing in for programs, they're in that location and they eat," said Judy Estrada, banana director of food services for El Paso ISD. "If there are no buses or transportation ... kids can't become into the programs and don't eat."
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Catherine Wright Steele, administrator at the Texas Section of Agriculture, which administers the summertime meals programs, offered other possible reasons for the drop in participation. Transportation is always a challenge for schoolhouse districts and nonprofits offering meals, she said, because the federal coin — which flows through a pair of U.Southward. Department of Agriculture programs — does not cover that expense.
Many Texas school districts offer meals and coach transportation in June, when students are in summer schoolhouse, only they often can't afford to keep the buses running in July and August after summer school ends, officials said.
That could mean that hungry kids whose parents aren't bachelor to drive them to school can't take advantage of gratis meals, Steele said.
The state agency conducts regular audits to ensure that school districts and nonprofits that receive federal reimbursement are post-obit the rules for distributing and counting meals, Steele said, but it doesn't accept plans to do a statewide survey to investigate the recent dip in participation.
Meanwhile, the land has participated in several national airplane pilot programs over the past five or six years to effigy out how to increase participation, and next summer it will be office of a federal airplane pilot program that will give depression-income families additional money for food on either Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan (SNAP) or Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) transfer cards so families won't have to travel to a specific nonprofit or schoolhouse commune for a costless repast.
"In that location's still work to exist done in Texas," said Signe Anderson, a policy analyst at the Food Research and Activeness Center and co-author of the report. "There are kids that are missing out on these meals who take access during the school twelvemonth."
More schools opt out of offering programs
Another reason that fewer kids are getting costless meals during the summer might be that more schools take stopped offering them.
School districts that are required to offer summer meals under the state police can apply for waivers to opt out if they can show that high start-up costs and depression participation would mean serving meals would cost them money, even with the federal reimbursement. They accept to place some otherschoolhouse district or organization that could serve those kids instead.
This summer, 236 districts received a waiver, a slight increase from final yr, Nolen said.
The majority of schoolhouse districts that applied for waivers are in rural areas, with virtually proverb transportation was the primary barrier. With students unable to get to schools that are often far from their homes, rural school districts often "don't believe they will have a high enough participation rate to come close to first the costs," Nolen said.
Transportation can also be a trouble in cities, where mazes of highways tin can forestall kids from walking to schools exterior their neighborhoods.
That'southward the case at Dallas ISD, which served about 13,000 fewer lunches in the summer of 2016 than 2015, according to land data.
For the kids tin can't get to the meals, Dallas administrators are because ways to bring the meals to them.
"We might have some sort of bus or a vehicle that's air conditioned, and you make that your picayune mobile feeding site," said Michael Rosenberger, executive director of food and child nutrition services for Dallas ISD. "It saves students from making a chancy trip."
Some districts have teamed up with community organizations to serve meals closer to where kids are, which could mean giving out sandwiches at a park, non the local school. That means "borer into community members who are really in tune with their local areas. They'll know if kids are hanging out at the park or community pool," Nolen said.
Finding better means to get meals to students, or vice versa, is crucial, according to educators and experts who are concerned about the tumbling numbers in Texas. In areas with high rates of hunger, they said, kids who don't observe free meals through the program are likely scrambling to become unhealthy, inexpensive food, if they're eating at all.
"They're non eating whatsoever kind of counterbalanced repast. They're probably scrounging at home trying to find the final piffling beans or rice on the pantry shelf," said Estrada, the El Paso ISD official.
With six kids under the historic period of ten, Kaylee Houser has made the eight-infinitesimal drive to Coronado Loftier Schoolhouse in El Paso weekdays this summertime to supplement their meals. A recent transplant to the city from New Jersey, Houser said she wouldn't have known the local high schoolhouse was serving free meals if a few other moms from her kids' schoolhouse hadn't pointed it out.
"If you lot don't take a high school student, you wouldn't become to the school and know about it," she said. "The publicizing needs to increase because a lot of times, we're the only ones in the whole gym."
Houston tries to reverse slide with advertizement
Houston ISD has tried to reverse its slide — the district served about fifty,000 fewer lunches in the summertime of 2016 than the summertime before, land data shows — by getting creative with its advertisement. This summertime, the district spent $20,000 to hang banners in schools across the district and put v-by-10-foot decals on 24 district-owned delivery trucks driven around the city.
"Nosotros need something that is constant out in that location, where people go to encounter it often," said Hernan Urrego, Houston ISD's operations manager.
Houston ISD officials attributed part of their decreased participation to a fluke — after a testing company made a serial of major flubs delivering scores for state standardized tests in 2016, the land said students who scored poorly didn't have to nourish summer school that year.
With about three-fourths of the commune's students getting complimentary or discounted meals during the school year, kids who don't show up in the summer are likely going hungry, said Keith Lewis, Houston ISD'due south senior operations manager.
And even if they bear witness up, he said, "the last meal they get here may be the meal they get that twenty-four hour period."
Source: https://www.texastribune.org/2017/08/02/despite-rise-demand-texas-feeds-fewer-hungry-kids-during-summer/
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