Childhood Hunger

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Summer Means Hunger For Some Children

Summary:

SCHOOL FREE LUNCH ESSENTIAL FOR IMPOVERISHED STUDENTS

June 22

Summer Means Hunger For Some Children

The Epoch Times
by Shahrzad Noorbaloochi
June 17, 2010

Hungry children are not only in the third world. Look at the United States and you’ll find that, according to 2008 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 1 in 4 American children lived in a household that struggled to put food on the table—that’s 16.7 million American children who live in a household with some level of food insecurity. Data from 2009 is expected to reveal an even grimmer picture as it was a tough year for American families hit with the worst of the economic recession.

During the school year, children suffering from such financial deficits are provided with affordable and reasonably healthy food through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), which works with schools to provide poor children with free or reduced-price meals.

The NSLP serves more than 31 million students in schools and residential child care institutions. About 19 million of those children eat free or reduced-price meals.

The beginning of summer spells bad news for such children as their access to school-provided meals is severed. Thankfully, there are programs such as the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), which provides children with access to food during the summer. However, these programs suffer from serious limitations.

According to a recent report by the Center for American Progress, “More than 31 million children benefit from the national school lunch program, 62 percent of whom receive free or reduced-price meals. But only one in six of these kids will receive a similarly subsidized summer meal during the summer months.”

Programs such as SFSP only reach a small fraction of the children who are in need, leaving a majority of them unaccounted for. Susan Acker of SFSP said, “In the summer, only … about 3.4 million, receive meals, either at summer school or through the Summer Food Service Program.”

Experts in the field of child psychology point to dire effects on children’s mental development from nutrition deprivation. Doctor David Shim, a clinical psychologist working with troubled and underprivileged children in Massachusetts spoke about such effects, saying, “There is ample evidence that food deprivation has long-term cognitive effects in a negative way.”

There are a host of reasons why these programs reach so few kids.

According to CFAP, one reason these programs are limited in their reach is a shortage in program sites. For every 100 schools, there are currently only 34 program sites providing food for children during the summertime.

The shortage observed could be attributed to the fact that such programs are struggling to find sponsorship from schools. Acker explains that SFSP is “vastly underutilized” because “Simply put, there aren’t enough sponsors and feeding sites in many of the communities with the highest need. Even though more than 20,000 school districts operate the National School Lunch Program in 101,650 schools and residential child care institutions, only about 8 percent of these school districts sponsor the Summer Food Service Program.”

The ability of these programs to reach kids who need them is also hindered by the fact that SFSP only operates in cities where 50 percent or more of the children are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches.

“This is the most restrictive threshold in the program’s history and disproportionately hurts rural and suburban communities, which often do not qualify for summer meals because poverty is not as concentrated as in urban areas,” reports CFAP.

According to Shim, there also needs to be a greater amount of effort simply letting the public know about the presence of such programs in their communities. He said the country needs “Much more social policy that makes these programs more known to people.”

Considering that child hunger costs the U.S. economy around $28 million a year in “health care, lost productivity, education system impacts, and charity system expenses,” according to CFAP, changes in policy and improvements in current programs could be crucial.

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