Last year, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a law providing free school breakfasts and lunches to all of the nearly 900,000 public school students in the North Star State. Now running for vice president, the Democrat doesn’t want you to forget it.
“While other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours,” Walz, a former teacher, said in his Aug. 21 speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Walz’s support for universal free school meals, a policy that has gained momentum in states following the COVID-19 pandemic, has become a prominent issue in this year’s presidential campaign. In the weeks leading up to and following Vice President Kamala Harris’ selection of Walz as her running mate, videos and pictures of the governor signing the Free School Meals for Kids Act into law, in which he is surrounded by adoring children, circulated on social media. And Walz has mentioned his state’s decision to enact the law in nearly every major speech since he joined the Harris ticket.
The policy stands in contrast with the approaches favored by Republicans.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives passed a budget package earlier this year that would eliminate the community eligibility provision, the U.S. Department of Agriculture policy that allows entire schools, districts, and groups of schools to provide all students with free meals regardless of income and receive USDA reimbursement.
And Project 2025, the conservative policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation with the help of officials who served in former President Donald Trump’s administration, similarly suggests eliminating the community eligibility provision and rejecting efforts to achieve universal free school meals. School meal programs should only benefit students who otherwise can’t afford lunch, Project 2025 and the House Republicans argue.
“Federal meal programs for K–12 students were created to provide food to children from low-income families while at school,” Project 2025’s USDA section reads. “Today, however, federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective and represent an example of the ever-expanding federal footprint in local school operations.”
(The Biden administration last year made it easier for schools to qualify for the community eligibility provision by lowering the threshold of students who need to qualify for free and reduced-price meals to 25 percent from 40 percent.)
The pandemic propelled free school meals policies
While Walz’s addition to the Harris campaign has raised the prominence of free school meals, the current push is really the result of shifting views of the role school should play in providing for students’ well-being, advocates for universal free school meals said.
Minnesota is one of eight states with a universal free school meals law, joining California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, and Vermont. All eight passed laws providing all students with free school meals in the past three years. Lawmakers in another 26 states have introduced bills to enact their own universal free school meals programs, according to the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit that advocates for policies to combat hunger.
The recent support for the policy can largely be credited to the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2020 through June 2022, the USDA provided schools with nutritional waivers that allowed school cafeterias to provide all students, regardless of income, with free meals. It was the first time in modern history that every student could get a meal at school for free.
“Those two years served as a nationwide kind of pilot project of what this policy could look like,” said Alexis Bylander, interim director of child nutrition programs and policy at the Food Research and Action Center. “Families, students, teachers, school nutrition professionals, administrators really saw the benefits of having free meals be offered to all students every day, and a lot of them didn’t want to go back to a system of charging students different prices for the same meal.”
Under the typical school meal system, students are deemed eligible for free and reduced-price meals based on their family’s income. Students fall into a range of categories, with some having to pay full price, others paying a discounted price, and others receiving meals for free.
School nutrition professionals told Education Week at the time that the pandemic-era waivers reduced the burden of complicated paperwork, helped make students more focused and alert in class, and removed the social stigma associated with qualifying for free or reduced-price meals. Research shows that students have improved attendance, can pay better attention in class, and have fewer behavioral problems when they have access to free meals.
“Every child feels good about themselves when every child has access to those meals,” said Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry New York, a nonprofit organization that advocates for universal free school meals and other efforts to reduce hunger.
What the election could mean for school meals
There is already widespread support for a federal universal free school meals program among Democrats, and pending legislation to make it a reality.
Although the policy is not mentioned in the 2024 Democratic Party platform, the chances of such a policy passing are certainly better under a Harris administration than a Trump administration.
Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., introduced the Universal Meals Program Act of 2023, which would amend the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 to provide all students with free breakfast and lunch at school. The bill is cosponsored by 106 House Democrats and 18 Senate Democrats, but it hasn’t gained any Republican support.
Democrats would either need decisive control of both chambers of Congress to pass the policy or would need to include it in a larger, must-pass budget package. A federal policy would allow the eight states that already have free meals to claim additional federal funding, rather than rely exclusively on state funding.
Trump himself hasn’t said much about school meals, but Republican votes to eliminate or scale back the community eligibility provision, as well as Project 2025’s proposals, suggest a free meals policy would be substantially less likely in a second Trump administration.
“Eliminating the community eligibility provision and the option for schools in high-need areas to offer school meals at no charge would be devastating,” Bylander, from the Food Research and Action Center, said. “A lot of kids at CEP schools rely on school meals for the majority of the food that they eat in a day or, in some cases, all of the food they eat in the day.”
Bylander would instead like to see federal policymakers expand the community eligibility provision to apply to entire states so they can provide all students with free meals regardless of income.
Regardless of the election’s outcome, Bylander and Sabella are hopeful that the attention brought to free school meals will generate more support at all levels of government.
“This is something that we have talked about for a long time,” Sabella said. “We’re excited about the momentum. We know it’s a proven way for kids to get the nutrition they need.”
