A legislative committee has approved a bill that would provide free school meals to Vermont students for the upcoming school year but would leave future years still in question.
The House Committee on Education voted 9-2 on Thursday to approve S.100, known as the Universal School Meals Act. The legislation would use $29 million in surplus funds to pay for breakfast and lunch for every public school student in the state.
The bill still has a ways to go before becoming law. But the committee vote represents a step toward forestalling — at least temporarily — a situation that lawmakers feared: that Vermont school children could be forced to go hungry at school.
For the past two years, federal Covid relief dollars have paid for breakfast and lunch for all public school students. But amid opposition from key Republican lawmakers in Washington, it’s unclear if that money will be renewed for upcoming school years.
Amid that uncertainty, anti-hunger advocates have been urging Vermont lawmakers to find public money to pay for breakfast and lunch for the state’s schoolchildren.
“Working families are struggling to get by, and to be able to afford to live in Vermont,” Faye Mack, an administrator with the nonprofit Hunger Free Vermont, told the committee on April 6. “And these are the families that we’re talking about here. The solution is universal school meals.”
For weeks, committee members have been trying to find a way to pay for those meals.
Lawmakers had initially considered adding taxes on sweetened beverages, candy and computer software to implement a permanent universal meals program. But Gov. Phil Scott’s administration has been staunchly opposed to that proposal.
Asked for his thoughts on the plan at an April 5 press conference, Scott said “no” before a reporter finished asking the question.
“I mean, in this time of unprecedented budget surplus, this is the last resort,” he said. “We’re not going to increase taxes now. That makes no sense to me at all at this point.”
The House voted in late March to set aside part of a roughly $96 million surplus in the state’s education fund, the product of unexpectedly high state revenues, to pay for the meals.
With Thursday’s vote, the committee would use $29 million of that surplus to pay for all public school students’ breakfast and lunch, regardless of their families’ income, for the 2022-2023 school year. The committee also expanded the program to include Vermont students who receive public tuition money to attend private schools within the state.
Since the program would rely on a temporary revenue bump, it covers only one year. But the proposed legislation includes provisions aimed at finding a more permanent funding source in the future.
The bill would direct the Agency of Education to report to lawmakers by January 2023 about “student participation rates” and “strategies for minimizing the use of State funds.”
Legislative economists would meanwhile be tasked with drafting a report “examining possible revenue sources including expansion of the sales tax base, enactment of an excise tax on sugar sweetened beverages, and other sources of revenue not ordinarily used for General Fund purposes.”
“The work that we’re doing here respected the governor’s request not to bring forth additional revenue sources this year,” said Rep. Kate Webb, D-Shelburne, the chair of the House Education Committee. “What we are doing is allowing a year for us to actually collect real data.”
Anti-hunger advocates hailed the advancement of the bill.
“We know that only when kids are well fed can they access the learning they need, and we know that students who receive free and reduced lunches feel the strain of socioeconomic stigma,” said Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont. “It is our job as a state to provide equal access and set our kids up to succeed.”
But Jason Maulucci, a spokesperson for Scott, did not say explicitly whether the governor would support the legislation.
“We understand the House has turned this into a one-year pilot program, but they have been clear they’re looking at funding it long-term with new taxes,” Maulucci said. “We will have to wait to see what happens in the Senate, but with record surpluses and unprecedented federal funding at our disposal, the last thing we should be doing is contemplating tax hikes.”
The bill must now be approved by the House Committee on Ways and Means and the House Committee on Appropriations before it reaches the House floor. Since the Senate signed off on an earlier version of the bill last year, the two chambers would have to reconcile their differences before sending it to Scott.
