Ending Childhood Summertime Hunger Through Direct Cash Assistance
Nearly 20 percent of children in the United States experience food insecurity when school is not in session. Hunger is particularly stark during summer months. The federal government’s Summer Food Service Program and charitable initiatives have historically fed children during the summer. Modern approaches to summertime nutrition include providing families with grocery vouchers to compensate missing school meals. However, both approaches fall short of solving the problem. The work of contemporary scholars and policymakers might suggest that straightforward financial security policies like the Child Tax Credit or a Basic Income Guarantee may more effectively eliminate child hunger during summer months and year-round.
Summertime hunger
Over the last decade, roughly 30 million children participated in the National School Lunch Program annually. In SY 2018-19, over 20 million students from households with incomes less than 130 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL) received free lunch. Nearly 2 million students whose household income was between 130-185 percent of the FPL received reduced priced lunch. Each year, schools serve about 4.9 billion free and reduced priced lunches at around $3.81 per meal. An additional 14.77 million students eat school breakfast daily, and about 85 percent receive it at a free or reduced price.
However, neither the National School Lunch Program nor the School Breakfast program is available when school is out of session. Food programs exist in some communities to help close the feeding gap, particularly via community centers in disadvantaged areas. Yet, such initiatives are neither widespread nor sufficient. This year, about 13 million children (1 in 6) may experience food insecurity during the summer months.
Hunger and food insecurity devastate childhood development. Both increase the chance of physical and mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, stomach aches, headaches, colds, and other chronic illnesses like asthma, obesity, and anemia. Hunger and food insecurity can also stunt physical growth and create toxic stress – an unrelenting activation of the body’s stress hormones. Additionally, child hunger can lead to depression and suicidal ideation even into late adolescence and adulthood.
Hunger and food insecurity also create adverse academic outcomes. They hurt test performance, diminish concentration, and lessen children’s learning throughout the year. One 2015 study found that, “children from food-insecure households were two times more likely to experience persistent symptoms of hyperactivity/inattention than children who are not food insecure”. Social stigma often accompanies food insecurity which further contributes to negative educational experiences.
The severity of food insecurity and hunger is often sharpest during summer months. Families living near or below the FPL often cannot make up for what schools provide during the school year. The average low-income household can only increase spending on food by $2.00 to $3.00 per child per week. Poorer nutrition contributes to what teachers call the “summer slide”, where children need to start the school year relearning what they did the previous year. The estimated cost of this reteaching is about $50 billion annually, approximately 10 percent of total U.S. spending on K-12 education. Summer hunger is too expensive and harmful to ignore. Yet, it persists at alarming rates year after year.
Historical summertime hunger solutions
The federal government’s history of providing summer meals to children is inconsistent because of fluctuating political support. In 1975, the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) was created. SFSP participation hit its first peak around 1977 with 2.8 million children participating. Over the next three decades, federal legislation would go back and forth between inflating and deflating SFSP participation. More recently, the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004 simplified and streamlined program participation. In 2010, Congress appropriated $85 million for pilot projects to feed low-income children during the summer months. In 2020, an all-time high of about 4.7 million children were fed summer meals. However, national summer meals programs reach less than a quarter of the children who need them.
Past attempts to address childhood hunger in the summer include utilizing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) infrastructure. Summertime expansion of the SNAP electronic benefits transfer system was coined “Summer EBT”. During the summer months of 2011-2013, the USDA conducted a randomized control trial experiment by increasing household SNAP benefits by $60 per child per month for one group of SNAP recipients, while another group received normal SNAP benefits. For children in the treatment group, very low food security fell by one-third. Thus, while the Summer EBT decreased some severe food insecurity, it did not eliminate all severe food insecurity or food insecurity entirely.
Activists and some members of Congress saw potential in USDA’s Summer EBT experiment. Representative Susan Davis (CA) introduced the Stop Child Hunger Act of 2015 (HR 2715) which would have granted households a one-time $150 per child increase in SNAP benefits during the summer. HR 2715 never left committee. Regardless, the primary mechanic of the legislation was flawed. One-time payments are less effective at curbing food insecurity than monthly payments.
Current anti-hunger initiatives
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government used Summer EBT as a model for “Pandemic-EBT” (P-EBT) to rapidly addressing students’ food needs amid widespread school closures. P-EBT legislation gave the Secretary of Agriculture authority to approve state agency plans to administer P-EBT for an amount equivalent to or greater than what schools would have spent on feeding children. P-EBT is widely lauded for reducing child hunger during the pandemic. Advocacy groups argued that the success of P-EBT justifies making Summer EBT permanent.
Among the most prominent pieces of legislation seeking to make Summer EBT permanent are The American Families Plan (Biden administration initiative), the Stop Child Hunger Act of 2021 (the most recent reintroduction of the 2015 bill), and the Hunger-Free Summer for Kids Act of 2021 (S.2005). The latter may have the most political viability because it has bipartisan co-sponsorship, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s support. However, the bill’s details limit its potential outcomes. In S.2005, eligibility for Summer EBT would be limited to children living “in a rural area, as determined by the Secretary; or outside an area in which poor economic conditions exist.” Not only does the bill exclude swaths of food insecure children who live in urban areas, but it also limits benefits to $30 per child per month. The 2011-2013 USDA studies demonstrated that a $30 benefit results in inadequate nutritional outcomes for food insecure children. Despite its potential, Summer EBT is a dubious avenue for ending child summertime hunger and food insecurity.
Scholars and activists alike have noted that summertime childhood hunger, and food insecurity more broadly, are caused by poverty. Thus, financial security policies are promising for addressing hunger indirectly. There is growing support for basic income guarantee (BIG) policies to address childhood hunger. Studies found that BIG policies lead to improvements in health and significantly lower rates of hunger.
Another more targeted financial security policy that has the potential to address childhood food insecurity during summer months is the Child Tax Credit (CTC). CTC is a partially refundable tax credit to parents that grants up to $2,000 per child. Up to $1,400 of it is “refundable”, meaning the parent can receive a cash check for that amount. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 temporarily expanded eligibility, made CTC fully refundable, and increased the credit to $3,600 per young child (0-5 years old) and to $3,000 per older child (6-17 years old) through the end of 2021. This augmentation of CTC is projected to reduce child poverty by over 40 percent. The Internal Revenue Service began issuing checks to about 35 million eligible families on July 15, 2021. In the following month, Census Bureau surveys conducted before and after the CTC payments revealed a 24% drop in households that said they “sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the past week”. The Census Bureau reported that 47 percent of people spent their CTC payments on food.
The evidence of pandemic-era legislation causing a rapid decline in food insecurity demonstrates the great potential that straightforward financial security policies can have on addressing hunger and malnutrition. The political viability of financial security policies like CTC and BIG is a separate question from their effectiveness. Yet, such direct cash assistance programs show that addressing poverty generally is a more apt approach to addressing the specific issue of childhood summertime hunger than more targeted policies like Summer EBT.
