When Talyn Summers was in middle school, their parents started receiving emails and text messages from their school multiple times a day. The problem? Summers had eaten school lunch but hadn’t paid in full: they owed 30 cents.
In a fairly well-off school district in Montgomery county, Pennsylvania, Summers remembers feeling like their peers were completely oblivious to the fact that other students might be plagued by the shame of “lunch debt”. While the US offers free school meals to its poorest students, many who don’t qualify still struggle to pay. According to the Education Data Initiative, more than 30 million students in the US can’t afford their school meals. On average, those students owe $180.60 each year, for a national total of $262m in student lunch debt annually.
“There’s people who are very, very poor, and they are getting free or reduced [meals]. And those people who are very wealthy, that are unbothered” by the cost, said Summers, 18, who’s now part of the Pennsylvania Cancel Lunch Debt Coalition, an activist group associated with the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, and the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union. “But then there’s that very forgotten large middle element, which is not receiving the help they need, but is still suffering from the debt.”
The coalition has since organized to have over $20,000 in school meal debt canceled in Bucks county, and seen state legislators introduce bills to provide universal school meals in the state, something that had been offered nationwide during the pandemic, but ended last year. Now, it seems, their national representatives are paying attention too.
Last week, Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman introduced a bill that would cancel all student meal debt. The bill, titled the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act, would order the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to pay off all of the debt that students accumulate when they cannot afford school lunches or breakfasts. Fetterman – who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Food and Nutrition, Specialty Crops, Organics and Research – was joined by co-sponsors Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Peter Welch.
“‘School lunch debt’ is a term so absurd that it shouldn’t even exist,” Fetterman tweeted. “That’s why I’m proud to introduce a bill to CANCEL the nation’s student meal debt and stop humiliating kids and penalizing hunger.”
In the US, public and non-profit private schools use a three-tiered system to determine how much students pay for school meals. Students living within 130% of the poverty line are eligible to receive free school meals, those within 185% can receive meals at reduced prices, and all others pay full price. But many families who are not eligible for free or reduced meals still might struggle to pay. And for families who are eligible, paperwork and the stigma around accepting free meals may also be barriers to access.
“As a result, many families who aren’t signed up for free or reduced price meals still can’t afford them. And this can result in school meal debt,” said Juliana Cohen, a professor of nutrition at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and Merrimack College.
Schools are not allowed to use federal child nutrition funds to pay off that meal debt, so many instead search for charitable donors – or tap into student activity or education funds. Sometimes, to dissuade students from accumulating more debt, advocates say schools will publicly shame students or give them a sandwich instead of a hot meal.
Vito Malacari, a high school government and civics teacher in Luzerne county, Pennsylvania, has seen students at his school collect a hot meal in the lunch line, only to be forced to dump it in the trash and exchange it for a cold sandwich when they can’t pay. “Everybody knows what that means, that you can’t afford a hot lunch,” said Malacari, who is also a member of the Pennsylvania Cancel Lunch Debt Coalition.
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress authorized the USDA to provide free meals to every public school student in the country, about 50 million children. But in 2022, when the program was scheduled to expire, Republican lawmakers blocked attempts to extend the program. At the same time, other pandemic-era safety nets began evaporating, and child poverty more than doubled in 2022.
Since then, nine states – California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico and Vermont – have introduced programs making school breakfasts and lunches permanently free. Meanwhile, advocates are calling on lawmakers to make school meals free nationwide. Fetterman is among the cosponsors of the Universal School Meals Program Act, a bill which would provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack to every student.
Hunger can make it challenging for students to perform well in school. In a pre-pandemic study, the organization No Kid Hungry found that nearly 60% of children from low-income communities went to school hungry – and of those, 12% said that hunger made it impossible for them to concentrate on their evening homework. Food insecurity is also linked to adverse mental health outcomes for children, Cohen said.
While schools were offering free meals to all students during the pandemic, Cohen and her colleagues at Merrimack College’s Nourish Lab were able to observe the impacts of universal free school meals.
“Students who are already eligible and signed up for free or reduced price meals are now more likely to eat them,” said Cohen. Additionally, they found that free meals offered nutritional benefits to all students. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, students who eat school meals consume more whole grains, milk, fruits and vegetables – and do better in school – than those who do not.
Canceling student meal debt won’t solve the entire problem by itself, said Cohen. “But this is such an important step in recognizing the challenge of school meal debt, which can be crushing for schools.”
Now a high school senior, Summers said the weight of student lunch debt still hangs over them – they fear their school would threaten to not let them graduate if they don’t pay off the balance they owe.
“This is one of the scariest and most pervasive forms of debt that we have because it is directly affecting children,” said Summers. But for many students, who deal with the shame of not being able to afford a hot meal every day only to wonder if they’ll be able to afford college, a car or a house, “it feels like just starting the doom clock early”.
