When the Little Rock School District noticed student meal debt ballooning over a year and a half, it put out a call for community help in May. At more than $200,000, it was an amount never before seen by the district.
Donations started pouring in, including an $11.89 check from a great-grandmother who wished she could give more, says Stephanie Walker Hynes, the Arkansas district’s director of child nutrition. By August, donations totaling more than $50,000 – many of them from individual “angel” investors – had chiseled away at the debt, which had accrued at 13 of the district’s schools that did not qualify for federal free meals for all students.
The need for a giving campaign speaks to the stretched budget reality that many families are facing. Student meal debt has grown to an average of $537 a child, according to the School Nutrition Association. Pressures on families include soaring grocery bills, with the prices of wholesale vegetables jumping 38% in July and beef now at record highs.
Why We Wrote This
School lunch debt has been rapidly increasing. Now, changes to SNAP and Medicaid could reduce automatic eligibility for free and reduced-price meals. How are schools responding to prevent hunger and save their budgets?
School districts are trying to keep their students fed amid an expected reduction in help from the federal government and uncertainty about how much help states can provide. The Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” doesn’t directly mention school meals, but it includes historic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), both of which provide students direct eligibility for free or reduced-price school meals. States and schools are sizing up what their portion of the responsibility for access to food will now be.
“It’ll take a while to really see what that looks like,” says Clarissa Hayes, deputy director of child nutrition programs and policy at the Food Research & Action Center. “With these SNAP cuts, a lot of the onus is going to be on states to figure out how to push through these and how to allocate funding.”
All of that is a recipe for concern for educators and parents, who have been sounding alarm bells over changes they say could increase childhood hunger – and decrease learning. Research has consistently shown that students who are properly fed perform better in class.
The pandemic brought a period of free lunches for all students, footed by the federal government. That universal free lunch waiver expired in 2022. Today, nine states offer students free meals, regardless of income. New York’s new universal school meal program goes into effect when students head back after Labor Day.
Meal debt on the rise
Almost all school districts (97%) that do not offer free school meals reported challenges regarding unpaid debt, according to a recent survey from the School Nutrition Association. Per U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations, meal debt cannot be paid off with federal funds. That forces districts to come up with the money, meaning it’s likely diverted from other educational uses. And meal debt has largely climbed over the past decade, reaching a district median of $6,900 in November 2024. That’s nearly 26% higher than the prior year and more than 100% higher than the median debt reported by districts at the end of the 2017-2018 school year.
With these concerns already in play, the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill poses another challenge. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the new work requirement brought by the tax bill would reduce SNAP participation by 2.4 million people in an average month over the next decade. The White House, for its part, has framed the changes as a means of combating waste, fraud, and abuse to serve the “truly needy.”
“SNAP was intended to be temporary help for those who encounter tough times – we are strengthening this program to serve those who need it most,” a White House announcement said in June.
Without direct SNAP eligibility for free or reduced-price school meals, more families will need to fill out paperwork to determine if they qualify, says Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, a lobbying group. But some families avoid applying out of embarrassment, immigration concerns, or lack of time.
“That application process is very burdensome, not only for the family, but for the school district,” she says. “And there are many ways throughout that process that an eligible child can slip through the cracks.”
Today, eligibility looks like this for a family of four: free meals for students from households earning $41,795 or less annually, and reduced-price meals for those making $59,478 or less per year. (Eligibility rates for Alaska and Hawaii differ.)
A typical school lunch last academic year cost $2.95 for elementary children, $3.10 for middle schoolers, and $3.30 for high school students, according to the School Nutrition Association. Multiplied over the course of weeks and months, advocates say those costs can be too much to bear for families living on the financial margins of eligibility.
After years working as a cafeteria manager for Meriden Public Schools in Connecticut and raising her seven children and dozens of foster children, Janet Crosetti-Jackson says the benefits of free school meals cannot be overstated. In her family, free school meals for her foster children allowed her to purchase pricier, healthy food for dinner, she says.
Every district has a policy for how to handle students who cannot pay, which could include providing an alternative meal such as a cheese sandwich, fruit, and milk. In Little Rock at least, no student is refused service in its dining rooms.
“We don’t turn away a hungry child,” Ms. Walker Hynes says. “It’s not the child’s fault.”
Other options for high-poverty districts
Ms. Crosetti-Jackson saw the need firsthand when students would regularly come through the meal line without any money.
“I would say, ‘Do you have the money for your lunch?’ And they would say no, and the bullying would immediately start from the kids behind them,” she says.
Now, most schools in her district have qualified for the federal Community Eligibility Provision, which enables free meals for all students in high-poverty districts. Last year, 54,234 schools across the United States participated in CEP, continuing a yearslong upward trajectory, according to the Food Research & Action Center.
Courtesy of Vivian Crespo
Susan Maffe, director of food and nutrition services for Meriden Public Schools, says she feels “blessed” to have the program in her community, where poverty is so high that the district operates a food truck to provide meals in the summer.
But that gratitude is laced with concern. Connecticut’s payment error rate – the extent to which a state is underpaying or overpaying for eligible SNAP benefits – in fiscal year 2024 was 10.25%. The Big Beautiful Bill mandates that any state with an error rate above 10% must pay 15% of its benefits costs, which could put Connecticut on the line for millions of dollars in future years.
Ms. Maffe isn’t waiting to see how Connecticut handles the potential funding changes. She is educating parents about their eligibility for SNAP benefits, which, in turn, could help the district maintain free meals for all students through CEP.
“If you’re eligible for SNAP, not only are you helping yourselves, you’re helping the school district,” she says, describing her message to parents.
In July, the Little Rock School District announced it had received approval to participate in CEP for the 2025-2026 academic year, meaning children at most schools will receive free breakfast and lunch. But, like her colleagues in Connecticut, Ms. Walker Hynes says she is keeping an eye on how federal changes play out in Arkansas. “I just don’t know how it will look,” she says.
Public schools provide students things like free bus transportation and Chromebooks, Ms. Crosetti-Jackson says. “But food, which is a necessity for living, we charge them for.”
