SAUGUS — The School Committee voted unanimously on Thursday evening to pass a resolution signaling the town’s support for keeping meals in schools free for all.
The free meals program was first instituted by the federal government in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last July, then-Gov. Charlie Baker and the legislature moved to extend the program for another year. With the free meals program set to expire, Project Bread, a Massachusetts-based charity seeking to increase food access, has kicked off a campaign to lobby state officials to make the program permanent.
Executive Director of Finance and Administration Pola Andrews brought the resolution before the committee as a part of her advocacy for the free lunch program in conjunction with Project Bread. The resolution, Andrews explained, is being brought before school committees across the Commonwealth.
With unanimous approval by the School Committee, Project Bread can now say Saugus supports expanding the program.
As Andrews noted during the meeting, the program is set to be extended through the end of the 2023-24 school year as part of a supplemental budget proposal filed by Gov. Maura Healey last month.
The $734 million proposed spending plan includes $171 million for the state-funded school meals program.
The proposal also directs the state’s Office of Education to report by early next year on options to extend this program into the future, including looking for ways to tap into federal funds to help pay for the meals. The administration had previously requested funding to continue the program through the current school year, according to Healey.
“The universal school meals program has proven to be a success in expanding access to nutritious meals for all students, and it’s essential that we keep it running,” Healey said in a statement.
Andrews told the committee that should the free meals program become permanent, Massachusetts would become the sixth state in the nation to provide this aid to its students. She said nearly one million school-aged children in the state are able to have breakfast and lunch for free at school as a result of the program.
Before the advent of the federal aid program, the way the state’s school lunch program was set up had its fair share of flaws, Andrews said.
“This is the best way to do it, it was an underfunded mandate as it was,” she said, explaining that under the free lunch program students who are not directly certified to receive a free meal can do so, while students who can afford to pay for lunch will do so. In years past, Andrews explained state reimbursements would at times fall short of covering the cost of providing the meals to students who weren’t paying the full charge, leading to the district having to pay the difference.
“To say that we’re just giving this away, in essence, we’ve been doing it before,” she said. “This is the right way to do it.”
School Committee member Dennis Gould, citing the fact that the Healthy Students Healthy Saugus program sends more than 100 students home with meals for the weekend, said food insecurity is clearly a problem in Saugus and elsewhere.
“I absolutely want to support this,” he said.
Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.