Even in Southern California it can be raw and cold just before dawn, when Eva Lopez and her friends begin forming outside the schoolhouse gate, waiting for the day’s first meal.
Most days, there’s no breakfast or any other meal at home, said 8-year-old Eva, so “I only eat at school most of the time.”
“These are almost all poor kids,” said Martha Ballardo, cafeteria manager at the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, a grade school in the mostly Hispanic San Fernando Valley neighborhood.
“Sometimes there are little ones lined up outside the gate at 6 a.m. when I get here,” Ballardo said. “You can see that they are very, very hungry. It is the worst on Monday, after the weekend. You can tell they haven’t eaten right.”
These tots are the faces not seen in the halls of Congress, where the new Republican majority has proposed repealing the National School Lunch Act. Because of this act, hundreds of millions of American children since 1946 have eaten free or low-price breakfasts and lunches.
Under the GOP plan, federal funding for the plan would be replaced by a block grant that would send cash to the states, to run child nutrition programs as they see fit.
The proposal is part of a sweeping GOP welfare reform bill that is expected to be voted on by the House of Representatives later this month.
Opponents of the repeal say it would damage or destroy one of the government’s most successful social programs. Without the federal entitlement, they say, schools would end up reducing meal services, raising prices or cutting portions, all to meet a shrunken budget.
Supporters retort that the reform would save millions of dollars by cutting out federal paperwork, rules and regulations. Instead, states would be freer to address local needs.
Surprisingly, the GOP may have a supporter inside the Vaughn Learning Center.
As the school’s 1,200 students dug into their free lunches, the principal, Yvonne Chan, gestured scornfully at a room across the hall where four inspectors-two from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and two from the California Department of Education-were reviewing Chan’s compliance with rules.
“If I could get rid of all this, I would be delighted,” she said. “I want more time and money to spend on the kids. That’s my bottom line.”
“Of all the paperwork that schools do, half of it is associated with the school lunch program,” said Jim Burke, an Illinois State Board of Education official who helps administer the program in Illinois.
“It is redundant to have both the USDA and the state audit this school, sitting in that room side by side,” said Michael Bush, a senior food service analyst with Marriott Corp. and a consultant to Vaughn and other San Fernando schools.
But that’s the rub. Chan, like many others who favor the block grant approach, say they do so only so long as the money to feed each child is not reduced.
The launching of the federal school lunch program in 1946 had more to do with national security than welfare.
In World War II, so many prospective GIs failed their physicals because of malnutrition-related problems that the federal government decided to strengthen the nation’s youth by serving free school lunches to the needy.
Today, the Department of Agriculture program serves meals-mostly lunches but often breakfast, too-to more than 25 million children. Of these, 14 million get the meals free or at reduced prices because they come from low-income families.
For 1995, the federal government will spent $4.48 billion on school lunches alone. Other child nutrition programs-which also will be killed and replaced by block grants-raise the total outlay to $7.56 billion.
This total was to have gone up to $8 billion in 1996 and $10 billion by the year 2000. According to GOP experts, the block grants will be sharply lower, a savings of $1 billion in 1996 and $2.15 billion by 2000.
The program has come under attack before. Children’s advocates fought off a Reagan administration proposal to weaken the program’s nutritional standards by counting ketchup as a vegetable.
Now, supporters say, the program faces a worse threat.
“You’d see a real erosion of school lunch programs as we know it,” said Undersecretary of Agriculture Ellen Haas.
Among other things, the block-grant system would drop the federal requirement that school lunches provide one-third of the recommended daily allowance of basic nutrients.
“What you’d see without national standards is not only ketchup (as) a vegetable, but maybe a soda and a side of fries qualifying as a lunch,” Haas said.
Congressional advocates of the reform say that getting the federal government out of the school meal business would have no effect on either the quantity or quality of the food. Any savings, they say, would come through trimming bureaucratic fat.
But the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington think tank, says its analysis of the bill shows it would cut a total of $7 billion over the next five years out of the school meal program and the highly regarded Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).
Cuts of this size, it says, could not possibly come from bureaucratic efficiencies alone.
Other critics agree.
Delaine Eastin, California’s superintendent of public instruction, warns that more than 745,000 of the state’s children, out of the 2.2 million who now get meals, would have to be dropped from the program if the GOP plan passes in its present form.
For instance, the block grants would not automatically be adjusted for inflation or higher enrollment, straining school budgets when enrollment rises.
Nor could the grants be increased during a recession. If schools faced increased need, the states would have to raise taxes, cut other services or reduce the quality of the meals. During the last recession, 1.2 million more low-income children than before qualified for the free lunches.
Most worrisome, the block grants would allow states to shift funds-up to 20 percent, Haas says-to welfare programs, such as day care, or even to such unrelated projects as highways.
On the front lines, the Vaughn Center’s Chan says that, if she gets the same amount of money-a big if-she could manage it better without bureaucratic interference. She has evidence to back her.
About 95 percent of her 1,200 students rely on school meals for almost all their nutritional needs. Most are Hispanic and the rest largely black. The highest annual income among the school’s families is $15,000.
From the federal food programs, Chan gets about $1.80 per student for lunch and $1.40 for breakfast. Through careful management and close contact with suppliers, she says, she feeds all her students-not just the 95 percent. Mexican favorites such as tacos, rice and beans are staples.
With the same money and less bureaucracy, Chan says, she could do even better. For example, she wants to give children a snack at 4:40 p.m., before they leave school.
“I know that most of these kids won’t get dinner until after 8 p.m. when the parents get home,” Chan said. “That is, if they get anything at all.”
