Children each lunch at Swallows Charter Academy in Pueblo West on Dec. 17, 2018. A new program to fund free school meals for all Colorado students is nearly $50 million short of budget projections. is already tens of millions of dollars short, jeopardizing some of the auxiliary programs tied to the ballot measure as lawmakers scramble to keep the initiative solvent and meals paid for.
The program’s expected $115 million annual cost was to be paid for by limiting tax write-offs for the wealthiest Coloradans and drawing on federal money. More thanhave found far more kids eating cafeteria food than projected, especially among those who wouldn’t have qualified under the usual poverty guidelines. And far fewer federal dollars are coming in to support the program than expected.
Districts expected about a 20% increase in students eating breakfast and lunch at school, said Brehan Riley, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Education’s school nutrition program. But in preliminary figures from the first few months of the school year, the reality is closer to 30% or more — representing nearly 150,000 additional meals served every day compared to the previous year.
The rural districts are small enough that the new state program’s broader subsidy for students’ regular meals wouldn’t result in huge windfalls, Sowell-Lovejoy said. It’s the local food grants slated for the second year — the ones that will most likely be cut to address the shortfall — that offered the most potential, both for the local growing economy and for keeping fresh, local food in the schools.
She’s the executive director of the Good Food Collective, a nonprofit group that works to increase access to healthy food. She said her phone started ringing almost as soon as Proposition FF passed. Fulfilling those parts of the program may even require another ballot measure to ask voters for more money, she said. No legislation has been introduced yet to address the shortfall in the near or long term.Right now, the focus is on maintaining the meals program’s near-term solvency and avoiding cuts to other state programs to pay for it.
U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen championed the healthy school meals program while serving in the state Senate. Now in Congress, the Democrat says she’s working to increase and expand the federal reimbursement program for school meals. She highlighted a provision in President Joe Biden’s budget proposal that would put more money into a key funding source for school meal reimbursements.