Question: What kind of a Legislature would pass a $15.2 billion state budget while allowing 6,000 school children to needlessly go hungry at lunch on the theory that it would cost too much to feed them? Answer: The New Hampshire kind.
Indeed, the final version of the biennial budget passed by the Legislature this month amid much bipartisan self-congratulation failed to include a proposal that would have automatically enrolled in the free and reduced-price school lunch program any child whose family was covered by Medicaid, the federal-state low-income health insurance program.
That means parents will have to continue filling out applications for their children to participate in the lunch program, if they are even aware of it and can navigate the application. As of now, an estimated 6,000 New Hampshire children who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches are not enrolled in the program, according to Sen. Becky Whitley, D-Concord.
Whitley’s colleagues, however, were not persuaded, despite lots of evidence that participation in the school lunch program results in better behavior and academic performance. The reason cited was concern over the cost of the program. But aren’t those meals funded primarily by federal subsidies? Well, yes. But as usual in New Hampshire when the Legislature declines to adopt a policy that appears to be a no-brainer, there is more to the story.
As the New Hampshire Bulletin reported, the costs alluded to are not those of the meals themselves, but rather those associated with the state’s school funding formulas, which use enrollment in the free and reduced-price lunch program as a measure of poverty. The state pays school districts more per pupil based on the number of lunch-program participants. Anti-hunger advocates estimate the additional cost of direct Medicaid enrollment in the lunch program at between $18 million and $30 million, while Senate president Jeb Bradley said it could cost upward of $100 million. Those wildly different estimates, of course, must be measured against the paltry amount of school aid the state now provides under the guise of funding an “adequate education.”
So instead of feeding the kids, a committee was created to study the costs. Not explained was why, if the Legislature believes that the lunch program serves as a proxy for poverty and has previously decided that those districts with the most needy children deserve extra help, it would not want to get the most accurate measure of poverty possible and provide that help where it’s needed most.
But why aren’t parents simply enrolling eligible children themselves? The answer is complicated, experts say, but boils down to the fact that there are barriers to doing so. They may not know about the program, may lack facility with the English language or may simply be too tired and busy to deal with it, especially if they are single parents working a couple of jobs. And we note that the prototype application on the U.S. Department of Agriculture website is sufficiently daunting in its complexity and detail to deter any but the most committed from filling it out.
This is hardly an unusual situation in the United States. As the Pulitzer Prize- winning sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of the new book, “Poverty, by America,” points out, many poor families do not take advantage of the government aid available to them: One in five workers eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit does not claim it; one in five parents eligible for government health insurance does not enroll; less than half of older Americans who qualify for food stamps actually sign up for them; only a quarter of families eligible to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families apply for it. In all, Desmond calculates, the amount of aid to the impoverished that goes unused in any given year is at least $142 billion.
Why is that the case? He argues that it’s because we as a society have made it hard and confusing to access that aid, and that any number of interventions have shown that raising awareness and cutting red tape are key to increasing participation. Something, for example, like automatic enrollment of Medicaid recipients in the free and reduced-price school lunch program.
And as New Hampshire is a wealthy state, we hasten to add that, according to Desmond, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021 for the well- or better-off, dwarfing what is spent on aiding the poor. In fact, by far the biggest beneficiaries of federal aid are affluent families taking advantage of government largess in the form of homeowner subsidies; tax-advantaged college savings plans and capital-gains income; tax exemptions for employer-sponsored health insurance; and many others where cost is apparently no object.
So if the Legislature has decided that despite the federal subsidies there is no such thing as a free lunch, we hold that New Hampshire — which ranked fourth among states in median household income in 2022 — can well afford to provide it.