MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This election cycle, school meals are on the menu - specifically, should kids whose families can afford to pay for school meals still get them for free? Our podcast The Indicator from Planet Money dug into the political debate. Here's NPR's Wailin Wong and Darian Woods.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Feeding public school students in the U.S. is a huge undertaking. Almost 5 billion lunches were served last year.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: Marcus Weaver-Hightower is a professor at Virginia Tech. He's also the author of the book "Unpacking School Lunch: Understanding The Hidden Politics Of School Food."
MARCUS WEAVER-HIGHTOWER: I kind of was looking around for what I thought would be the most complex thing I could find about schools, and it happens to be school meals.
WOODS: He says the government pays for either the whole meal or part of it. This depends on whether the student pays full price, reduced price or gets the meal for free.
WONG: Last year, 71% of lunches served were free or reduced.
WEAVER-HIGHTOWER: It's not a cheap program. I think currently, it's at about $21 billion. To do universally free school meals for all kids would cost about double that.
WOODS: Rebecca Wood lives near Boston and is a mother to a sixth-grader.
REBECCA WOOD: I was constantly keeping account of what I had in the cupboard - how many cans of beans, did I have a loaf of bread, that type of stuff.
WOODS: Rebecca's income was too high to qualify for free or reduced lunch. And at the same time, she was a single parent grappling with high rent and medical expenses, and sometimes, she had school lunch debt.
WONG: Then Rebecca learned about a federal program called the Community Eligibility Provision. Under this policy, if a certain percentage of the student population in a school or district qualifies for free meals, then all kids get free meals.
WOODS: Rebecca realized that her school district met the threshold but didn't participate in the program, so she pushed administrators to sign up. And they did.
WONG: But a recent budget proposal by a group of House Republicans calls for getting rid of the program.
WOODS: These lawmakers' objections flow into a larger debate around universal versus targeted policies.
WONG: Yeah, universal programs can come with a high price tag. Remember, Marcus Weaver-Hightower estimates that making free school meals universal would roughly double the cost to over $40 billion. Some of that money would go to school districts in affluent communities.
WOODS: But there is research showing that universal programs have particular benefits for recipients who do need the support. Michelle Marcus is an economist at Vanderbilt University.
MICHELLE MARCUS: Some of the poorest households, who we really care about, are, in fact, benefiting from expanding access to everyone in the classroom.
WONG: According to her study, after the expansion, low-income families were able to spend less on groceries every month, and they saw lower food insecurity.
MARCUS: This suggests that these households, even though they were previously eligible - there were some barriers to access that prevented them from taking up these benefits. And these are probably nonmonetary barriers, things like social stigma, and we think those seem to be really important.
WONG: Michelle says her research suggests that making free meals available to everyone took away those barriers. She is careful to point out, though, that because the Community Eligibility Provision only applies to high-poverty schools, it's not clear what the economic impact would be if a school in a more affluent area offered universal free meals.
WOODS: Darian Woods.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
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