A federal school meal program is set to expire on June 30. If Congress doesn’t extend the plan, more than a million Georgia students could be left without a safety net.
When schools shut down in 2020 due to the pandemic, Congress approved school nutrition waivers, which were issued through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). They allowed all students receive free meals without any paperwork. The waivers also gave schools flexibility on meal distribution, like offering them a “Grab and Go” style, for example, so students could take meals home.
“Those flexibilities had hugely impactful positive impacts on kids and families in the midst of pretty dire circumstances that kids and families are continuing to face,” says Jamie Bussel, the senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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