Should Taxpayers Be Paying for Students’ Breakfast and Lunch?

There are currently nine states that provide free breakfast and lunch to all public school students: California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Vermont.

In Colorado, voters will be deciding this November whether the “free” meal program will continue.

Originally approved in 2022, a “Yes” vote on Proposition MM will increase taxes on those families or individuals earning more than $300,000 a year and keep the current program going. The existing “Healthy School Meals for ALL” (HSMA) has been running annual deficits since its inception.

The concept of taxpayer-funded meals at public schools for the poor is not a new phenomenon. Adopting and adapting policies from Europe, The Children’s Aid Society in New York launched a program in 1853. The benefit was limited to a vocational school. Despite calls by some to expand it across public schools, it took until the early 1900s for it to become policy in several large city districts.

Historians credit a book written by Robert Hunter in 1904 with triggering wider acceptance, who wrote,

There must be thousands – very likely sixty or seventy thousand children – in New York City alone who often arrive at school hungry and unfitted to do well the work required.

It is utter folly, from the point of view of learning, to have a compulsory school law which compels children, in that weak physical and mental state which results from poverty, to drag themselves to school and to sit at their desks, day in and day out, for several years, learning little or nothing.

If it is a matter of principle in democratic America that every child shall be given a certain amount of instruction, let us render it possible for them to receive it, as monarchial countries have done, by making full and adequate provision for the physical needs of the children who come from the homes of poverty.

Early implementation of the benefit was run by outside charities until the Philadelphia School Board assumed control in that city in 1909. Other districts soon followed.

To be sure, America was a much different place at the turn of the 20^th century. At the time, welfare programs were limited. But then came the Great Depression and President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” efforts which significantly expanded and began normalizing and destigmatizing the distribution of government aid.

The Special Milk Program (SMP) launched in 1954 was actually a government subsidy to dairy farmers that doubled as a benefit to students, who could then purchase it for a reduced price. President John F. Kennedy began the tradition of “National School Lunch Week” in 1962 to highlight the correlation between healthy eating and learning.

The Child Nutrition Act of 1966 codified the concept and empowered and encouraged the Secretary of Agriculture to play an active role in making sure America’s schoolchildren had healthy food options in the cafeteria. Federal grants and subsidies incentivized participation.

Of course, there is a big difference between providing and encouraging the availability of nutritious foods in schools and expecting taxpayers to fund it all. In the evolution of school breakfast and lunch programs, unfortunate and unnecessary class divisions have emerged.

In some cases, such as in Colorado, taxpayers of a certain income level (over $300,000) bear the burden – but all taxpayers, regardless of income, help fund public school, and the monies are often fungible.

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone unmoved by efforts to help those students and families in true need – but the idea of a state providing free meals for everyone? One might argue it’s a matter of fairness. Others will point out the sensitivity and embarrassment of some paying and others not paying anything at all.

Yet, does the government providing free meals for all instill and cultivate a dangerous mindset that Big Brother is here to take care of you from beginning to end? Or is it in the best interest of all given the importance of children eating well in order to learn well? But is it really a zero-sum game?

Thomas Sowell once observed, “Cell phones and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there were no school-lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are overweight more often than other Americans.”

In Colorado, no groups have formed to oppose the proposition to continue free meals, and no money has been raised to try and persuade people to vote against the initiative. It seems nobody wants to be accused of supporting anything that’s anti-child.

It’s ironic, though, that many of the same people who support taxpayer meals for children also support the right to kill children who, just a few years earlier, were still in the womb.

Image from Shutterstock.