A Reform That Eats Its Young

Around noon Monday hundreds of hungry kids will rush the school lunch rooms in Spokane’s suburban Central Valley School District.

They will be famished.

“We see lots of kids on Monday come to school just starving,” said Gary Pannell, food service supervisor for Central Valley. “We think it has something to do with not having met the daily nutritional requirements over the weekend.”

In other words, hundreds of kids in the suburbs aren’t fed well enough at home on Saturday and Sunday.

They rely on hot lunch Monday at school to charge their systems and feed their brains.

In the CV district alone, more than 3,500 kids will eat hot lunch each day.

In Spokane’s School District 81, 16,000 federally subsidized breakfasts and lunches will be served tomorrow, and each day of the school year.

In all, about four in 10 Spokane area low-income school children are fed a federally subsidized breakfast or lunch.

But this could all change.

Next week the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on whether to repeal the National School Lunch Act and the Child Nutrition Act.

The repeal will be part of the fine print under the “Contract With America” clause dealing with welfare reform.

Welfare needs major reform. The hot-lunch program doesn’t.

Good conservatives have an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to separate needed reform from needless wrecking.

At the moment, their inclinations don’t seem to be running in that direction.

“The bill to repeal the School Lunch Act and the Child Nutrition Act was introduced one day last week, taken into committee two days later over a holiday weekend, and now is moving to a vote without giving schools an opportunity to even comment on it,” explained Gene White, legislative coordinator for the 65,000-member American School Food Service Association.

Perhaps your talk radio host or congressman forgot to mention the problems with junking the National School Lunch Act and substituting it for a huge program of state-controlled block grants. Here is what the school food service experts say:

Hot lunch is one federal program that works. In 1946, Congress decided to start funding hot lunch in schools. The reason? During World War II, thousands of young men were unfit for military service due to poor nutrition as children. Until this year, both Republican and Democratic Congresses agreed having undernourished kids was a national security issue.

Bonnie Peery, the secretary in the Food Service office at Central Valley Schools explained why she thinks the program has worked well for nearly 50 years: “The federal hot lunch program is the only place were government can guarantee government money is going to the proper recipient. We can’t give the food to anybody but the kids.”

The block grant program is unwieldy and untested. The “Contract With America” lumps hot lunch in with welfare reform and then suggests putting billions of dollars in block grants. Nobody knows if this will work.

“What we’re looking at is an untested, untried, little understood experimental program that would start Oct 1 and affect 26 million kids,” said school food service legislative coordinator White. “This is moving far too rapidly for quality analysis.”

State governments could gum up the works. Block grants are not easy to administer and will be highly subject to pressure groups within states. “For example, block grants don’t take into consideration any fluctuations state-by-state or community-by-community,” said Richard Skinner, director of Spokane School District 81’s food service program. Block grants don’t allow for any rainy-day funding for school lunches that might be needed, say, if Boeing or Kaiser had a strike or laid off bundles of workers.

Even more messy, the block grant proposal allows states to take up to 20 percent of block grant money from one category and put it in another. This guarantees brutal battles over resources that until now had been targeted for one purpose: feeding hungry school kids.

These changes won’t save money or feed more children. Tinkering with the school lunch program will lead to more administrative work at the local level and force some schools to simply drop out of the hot lunch program. “I’m concerned that we will replace an efficient federal program with 50 separate programs administered by the states,” said District 81 food service director Skinner.

And, since the block grant program likely will specify that middle-class kids can’t get free lunch, many middle class neighborhood schools will likely just drop the program altogether, leaving the low-income kids in those schools without a federally supported lunch.

I don’t think conservatives want to stop feeding these kids.

Congress rightly wants to reform food stamps and other programs where waste and fraud are costing us money and faith in government.

But some things the federal government does better than the states, and running the hot meal program appears to be one of them.

Unless reformers can distinguish the excesses from the well-run, needed federal programs, support for all reform will bog down.

Encourage your legislators and gurus of reform to find the scalpel and put away the axe. This change of tools will greatly help the effort to fulfill a meaningful contract with America.

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