Bill Will Re-Up child hunger efforts

BY STEVE SMITH Staff Writer - Reminder News

Representatives of food banks, school lunch administrators, and other town and school officials from across the state converged at Rockville High School in Vernon last Tuesday for what was termed a “listening session” with U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney.

The event doubled as a rally for support for a bill heading to Congress, as well as the programs and implementations that are expected to follow it.

Lucy Nolan, executive director of End Hunger Connecticut! (EHC) said Congress is scheduled to act on the reauthorization of childhood nutrition programs in the next six months.

“We’ve already begun,” she said. “Their bill’s already in the hopper.”

She added that the programs, essential to feeding the nation’s children, include school lunch programs (including school breakfast), summer feeding programs , day care and after-school meals, and the Women, Infant and Children (WIC) program.

“These are really needed now more than ever,” Nolan said. “Participation in these programs has increased significantly .”
Eleven percent of households in Connecticut , Nolan said, are affected by “food insecurity,” meaning that somehow their ability to get food is disrupted . Connecticut also ranks last in the nation for number of schools that serve breakfast.

“However,” Nolan said, “we’ve moved from 47th to 40th for the number of kids getting a school breakfast.”

The National School Lunch Act was passed in 1946, when young men were showing up to draft boards and failing their physicals. “If Congress were to write it today,” Ellen Teller of the Food Research and Action Center in Washington , D.C., said, “it would probably look exactly the same.”

She read part of that act that states, “It is hereby declared to be a policy of Congress, as a measure of National Security …to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation’s children.”

According to Teller, a recent commission of military generals reached the same conclusion – that today’s youth are not healthy enough to serve, and are flunking physicals.

Teller said there are three principles driving the efforts for the 2009 Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act; Expansion of access and participation in these programs, especially for low-income children; Improvement of meal quality; and Modernization of the administration of the programs.

Teller said the bill would flow nicely after the healthcare reform bill, since many of the programs pertain to health promotion and disease prevention.

“We see that we’re in the on-deck circle ,” she said. “When we get up to bat, we will continue to send players around the bases.”
EHC’s Child Nutrition Policy Director , Dawn Crayco, said EHC’s studies found that summer meal programs, funded federally, are based on the average income of a geographical area, rather than by the incomes of individual families. So, there are a number of families that could benefit, but simply do not have access to the program.

“An administrative change that could dramatically open lines of access to children [would be to] increase the lines of the area-eligibility test,” Crayco said, adding that 50 percent of children in a given area must reach the income threshold – a number that is “too high.”

The act will also address a gap that exists in school-based meals.

Monica Pacheco, Food Services director for Vernon Public Schools, said she has seen positive changes in the standards of reimbursements for schools that improve the nutritional content of meals. However, the cost of school lunches would still have to increase, in order to offset the costs of the underfunded free lunch programs.

“We have also seen a dramatic increase in the number of families who qualify for free and reduced-price meals,” Pacheco said.
Courtney said he is optimistic about the bill being funded.

“In my opinion, by looking around this administration,…there are people who are passionate that we’ve got to switch our priorities, domestically, towards young Americans,” he said. “A big part of it is this plan. The forces are aligned in a good place right now to get this done.”

He added that the efforts of groups and individuals also need to continue.

“Groups like the TVCCA, the Norwich School system, and the Vernon school system [need] to keep pounding away at the obvious need that exists out there,” Courtney said.

Courtney cited studies of how stimulus monies are being used, and to what extent they shortening the recession.
“This issue…has a great economic benefit, in terms of the U.S. economy,” he said. “For every dollar spent on food stamps, the multiplier effect of the boost it gives to economic activities is $1.84. That’s actually a higher multiplier than unemployment benefits, infrastructure spending, technology, and other programs.”

Rep. Karen Jarmoc of Enfield (59th district), co-chair of the House task force on children in the recession, said the recession is expected to send an additional 35,000 children in the state into poverty.

Last week, Jarmoc and her daughter shadowed a family that utilizes the Enfield Food Shelf.

“We are trying to get by on the food that the family would receive from the food shelf,” she said. “Quite honestly, I already know that we are not going to get by.”