For 2 years, Tarrant County students got free lunch at school. This year, only some will

When Heather Faaborg heard that the universal school lunch program was ending, the first thing she did was open the calculator app on her phone.

“Right now everything has to be budgeted,” said Faaborg, a mom with two kids in Crowley’s school district. “There’s no wiggle room.’”

Faaborg’s family is one of many throughout Tarrant County who will face the upcoming school year with one less pandemic support system. For the past two school years, the federal government paid for free school breakfasts and lunches for all students, regardless of their family’s income or whether they would usually qualify under the National School Lunch Program.

But in June, the provision that allowed for universal free meals expired.

Faaborg, a special education teacher with the Fort Worth school district, and her husband make more than $36,075 — too much money to qualify for the free lunches. They face the coming school year and the rising cost of groceries with one less support system that was available for the past two years. For Faaborg’s two kids, she estimated that it would cost her family about $1,000 for the 2022-23 school year for both of her kids to buy their lunches every day.

Some school district campuses will still be able to offer all of their students free meals. Schools in low-income areas can participate in a program that allows them to provide free meals to all, regardless of whether the child has applied for the free lunch program. In the Fort Worth school district, for example, 120 of the district’s 140 campuses have so many low-income students that they can offer free meals for all students, said Joseph Corbun, the chief of district operations.

But that doesn’t apply to all campuses, leaving some families in a difficult position. Like Faaborg, April Hopkins’ family makes too much to qualify for the free lunch program. This year, Hopkins’ first-grader in the Arlington school district will have to either bring her lunch from home or pay for it, adding one more stressor to the family’s already tight budget.

“My grocery bill just keeps going up and up,” Hopkins said. “We’re not a family where (free school lunches) are a necessity for us. But there’s so many families that are just in this middle zone where we’re feeling the pinch of the price increases, but at the same time, we don’t qualify for some of the benefits that the lower-income families do.”

Giving every American student free meals had a huge impact on childhood food access during the first two years of the pandemic, said Jeremy Everett, the founder and executive director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty.

Everett credited universal school lunches combined with other pandemic support programs as the reason that the overall number of Americans with consistent access to enough food stayed steady between 2019 and 2020, despite the economic turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We didn’t see a huge permanent spike in food insecurity, like we saw coming out of the Great Recession,” Everett said.

In 2008, in the middle of the Great Recession, the share of American households without adequate access to food reached an all-time high of 14.6%, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, because of a combination of government aid, nonprofit assistance, and local communities throwing “everything and the kitchen sink” toward addressing hunger, Everett said.

But as supports like universal school lunches go away, and inflation drives the cost of groceries and food higher, Everett said he expects child hunger to rise.

“Inflation this year is going to likely have a higher impact on childhood food insecurity than the pandemic did,” he said. “We’re not going to be throwing the kitchen sink at hunger, like we were the past several years.”