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Every school in Kentucky’s LaRue County provides free breakfast and lunch to any student who wants it.
It’s been that way for a decade, ever since the federal government launched a program allowing LaRue County Schools, and thousands of other districts nationwide, to skip the paperwork asking how much families earn.
In these communities, lots of kids already receive other kinds of assistance for low-income families. Federal officials saw a way to make the subsidized meals program more efficient: Cover meal costs based on how many children are in similar assistance programs, rather than verify every family’s income.
But LaRue County Schools won’t be able to do that anymore if sweeping changes to social programs proposed by congressional Republicans become law. GOP lawmakers say they want to ensure only eligible families get help and that taxpayer dollars are reserved for the neediest students, so that federal subsidies for school meals remain sustainable. But by one estimate, the Republicans’ plan would affect nearly a quarter of the students in the nation’s public schools.
Research has found that universal free school meals can boost school attendance, increase test scores, and decrease suspensions, likely because it eliminates the stigma students often associate with the free meals. Taking them away from students on a large scale could also have downstream effects on everything from families’ household budgets to local unemployment.
Stephanie Utley, the LaRue County district’s director of child nutrition, said that inevitably, fewer kids would eat school meals, either because their families no longer qualify for free breakfast and lunch or because they cannot produce documents to verify their income.
When fewer kids eat school meals, it’s harder for districts to cover their costs. To save money, Utley would likely swap higher-quality foods for cheaper ones, she said.
Apples and beef from local farms would go. The high school would serve fewer salads — they’d be too labor-intensive to prep. And a popular chicken breast sandwich would become a ground chicken patty.
Utley may have to lay off staff, too, she said, which would hurt the rural community’s economy.
“We’re the biggest restaurant in town,” she said. “It would be a nightmare.”
GOP school meals proposals would impact states
Republican lawmakers are considering a trio of proposals to help offset tax cuts sought by President Donald Trump that would be “devastating” to children and schools, said Erin Hysom, the senior child nutrition policy analyst for the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center.
One proposal would dramatically increase the share of students who need to be enrolled in aid programs — such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — for schools to be eligible to serve free meals to all kids through the Community Eligibility Provision.
Right now, schools need to show 25% of students are enrolled in those kinds of assistance programs to participate in community eligibility. The House Republican proposal would raise the share to 60% — higher than the threshold has even been. That would kick more than 24,000 schools off of community eligibility, and some 12 million students would no longer automatically qualify for free meals, Hysom’s organization estimated.
Essentially, only communities where nearly every child qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch could serve free meals to all kids.
“They’ve really moved the needle to the upper echelon of poverty,” Hysom said. “You couldn’t get any higher than that.”
Another proposal would require all families who don’t automatically qualify for free school meals through programs like SNAP to submit documents to verify their income with their application. That would burden families and schools with time-consuming added paperwork. Schools could end up cutting staff who serve food and work on school menus to hire more people to process applications.
Together, those changes would save $12 billion over 10 years, according to the list of proposals circulated by U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, the Republican chair of the House budget committee.
A third proposal would change how families qualify for SNAP and likely make over 1 million students no longer automatically eligible for free school meals. That would increase the paperwork burden even more.
All of that would make it more costly for states with universal free school meals to run their programs, because they rely heavily on federal reimbursement. Some states were already weighing whether they could afford to keep up free meals for all.
These three proposals are part of a process known as budget reconciliation that GOP lawmakers are using to make long-term changes to federal spending and revenue. As of Wednesday, Congress was considering a separate, stopgap budget that would keep funding essentially flat for the Agriculture Department, which pays for the school meal program, through the end of September.
School staff and child nutrition advocates are taking the House’s budget reconciliation proposals seriously. The Trump administration has already cut a $1 billion Agriculture Department program that helped schools buy food from local producers.
Free school meal cutbacks would have ripple effects
If fewer kids have access to free meals at school, more families would likely struggle to afford groceries at home. Many families who don’t qualify for free meals struggle to pay for food. This school year, a family of four qualified for free school meals if they made under $40,560 a year.
When schools eliminated free school meals for all following the pandemic, there was a surge in unpaid school meal debt, an issue school staff say will only intensify if these proposals go through.
Right now, schools typically have to verify the family’s income for 3% of their applications. If schools had to check income for every application, the burden would be enormous, school staff and child nutrition advocates said.
Many families who eke out a living working multiple jobs would have a hard time gathering up all the required documents to show how much they earn. Though children can participate in the school meals program regardless of their immigration status, undocumented parents may be afraid to hand over personal documents when Trump is threatening mass deportations.
“Eligible children are going to fall through the cracks,” Hysom said.
Many schools are already facing financial pressures from higher-than-usual food and labor costs, a 2024 survey of nearly 1,400 school nutrition directors showed. On top of that, schools are navigating new and stricter requirements for how much salt and sugar can be in food served by schools.
Schools have to buy most of their food from American sources, but if Trump puts certain tariffs in place for the long term, that could create new financial constraints.
“Cost is absolutely a concern,” said Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, which represents school nutrition directors and conducted the survey. “When avocados or tomatoes from Mexico become much more expensive, that will cause an increase in demand for domestic produce, and an increase in price, as well.”
Shannon Gleave, the president of the School Nutrition Association, understands the need to make sure the school meal program runs as it should.
In Arizona’s Glendale Elementary School District, where Gleave is the director of food and nutrition, kids can speed through the lunch line because everyone qualifies for free meals. But staff scan student ID badges to make sure each kid only takes one meal, and that children with dietary restrictions get the right food.
Upping the verification requirements a little could work, she said. But verifying 100% of applications “is not an efficient use of time.”
“There is no way my existing staff could do that now,” she said. “You have to figure out a way to be good stewards of resources, but also look at the amount of administrative burden that it’s going to entail.”
Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.
