The end of a pandemic-relief program to provide free breakfast and lunch to all of America’s schoolchildren means renewed financial hardships for families and schools around the U.S.
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act, and other pandemic spending bills funded free meals for all children regardless of income. But that funding ended last year despite calls from anti-hunger advocates to continue the program.
“We are really concerned about the impact of the debt on the families, but also on schools that are struggling to collect,” Diane Pratt-Heavner, director of media relations for the School Nutrition Association, told CBS MoneyWatch. “These losses, if they are unable to collect, will cut into education funds.”
Data shows that hundreds of schools are falling behind in paying for meals, with unpaid debts for those expenses  eaching $19.2 million as of November among the roughly 850 schools that reported such deficits, according to the School Nutrition Association, a professional group of school nutrition experts that ran the study. One school district alone reported meal debts of $1.7 million, while the median unpaid meal debt was $5,164 per school, the report noted.
Although such dollar figures may seem low, they can have a severe impact on schools strained by the effort normalize their operations after the pandemic shutdowns earlier in the pandemic and, more recently, the impact of scorching inflation on their strained budgets.
The problem “underscores the extreme hardships that both families and schools continue to face and the need to find solutions,” Lisa Davis, senior vice president of Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign, said in an email.

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