Project 2025 would take kids’ school lunch off the table in some Wisconsin schools

Today, families with tight food budgets in rural and low income districts can count on their kids getting two nutritious meals at school for free, thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration. Donald Trump’s Project 2025 calls for an end to that program, leaving millions of kids without food.

Nervous excitement fills the swine barn at the Northern Wisconsin State Fair as brother and sister Elliott and Whitney Gotham affix show tags to their shirts, brush their two hogs, and get ready for the show ring.

“I’ve been walking the pig every day for the last couple of months, so it walks nice today—hopefully,” Elliot, 17, said with a smile.

In the pen, 15-year-old Whitney tends to her hog. “I’m putting show spray on him so you can see more of his muscles,” she explained.

The Duncan Creek 4-H Club kids attend New Auburn High School, in the same K-12 school where their mom teaches.

Kristi Gotham said her second graders always have questions about her kids’ animals.

“They ask, ‘Does chocolate milk come from brown cows?’” Kristi said with a laugh. “They don’t understand where their meat comes from, where their steak comes from—until we have those conversations.”

“We just gently tell them, ‘That’s what the animals are raised for—to produce meat for us.’”

Food comes from a grant

Twenty-five miles down the road from the fairgrounds is the rural New Auburn School District. It has one building and 300 students.

Kids might not know exactly where their food comes from, but they do know they don’t have to bring any lunch money in order to get a nutritious breakfast and lunch every day.

“A USDA grant allows us to give every kid in the building free breakfast and free lunch,” Superintendent Jim Reif said.

That grant funds the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), a program expanded by the Biden-Harris Administration last fall, which gives all students in a school or district free meals if a certain percentage of students are eligible. The threshold used to be 40%, but eligibility has recently been lowered to 25%.

A report from the Food Research and Action Center shows across the country, participation in the program has been climbing dramatically. More than 40,000 schools took part in the 2022-2023 academic year, which is an increase of about 7,000 schools the year before.

More than 20 million children attend a school that utilizes CEP.

The program is a relief to the New Auburn superintendent, as food insecurity rates are increasing in rural areas and he and his staff are noticing that trend.

School staff helps distribute food from area pantries, and superintendent Jim Reif said “This last school year we sent home 30-35 bags of food a week.”

“That’s about a 35% increase from the year before, so the need is definitely going up.”

For the families in the district, they may not have time to make a 30-minute run to the bigger city of Eau Claire for groceries. Or Reif said, it could be about transportation.

“Frankly, New Auburn is 10 miles to Bloomer, 14 miles to Chetek, 25 miles to Chippewa Falls—for transportation, sometimes a family is working off one vehicle and maybe that vehicle isn’t super reliable,” Reif said. “If we can bring the food to them, that helps a lot.”

Photo by Salina Heller/UNN

Families get a break

Reif said about half of kids in the district would qualify for the Free or Reduced Lunch program, which is the parent program of CEP.

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) reimburses schools and districts for offering low-cost or no-cost lunches. Children in families at or below 130% of the federal poverty line qualify for free lunches and children in families at or below 185% of the federal poverty line qualify for low-cost lunches. The 2024 Federal Poverty Level is $25,820 for a family of three.

Reif said even for middle class families, the cost to eat at school adds up. “An average kid is probably $5 a day; so $25 a week per child, $100 per month–if you have three kids, that’s 300 bucks a month–that’s a pretty big hit to the budget.”

The grant allows for a little relief. “It gives them a little bit of safety and security,” Reif said. “You hear stories where kids have negative balances on lunch accounts.”

“It’s just one less worry for working families to try to figure out how to feed their kids.”

Project 2025 would take it away

The Biden-Harris Administration has implemented initiatives for its promise “to advance a pathway to healthy school meals for all students.”

US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said, “Increasing access to free, healthy school breakfast and lunch will decrease childhood hunger, improve child health and student readiness, and put our nation on the path to better nutrition and wellness.”

He also explained that CEP promotes equity by eliminating out-of-pocket costs for families and by reducing stigma.

School lunch programs are addressed in the Republican blueprint for a second Trump presidency, titled Project 2025, in the chapter on the US Department of Agriculture. While Project 2025 would permit free and reduced lunch to stay under the NSLP, the chapter’s author calls for an end to the CEP program, which helps entire schools when enough students qualify.

The document reads, “Federal meal programs for K-12 students were created to provide food to children from low-income families while at school. Today, however, federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective.”

In New Auburn, the district is ready to receive the CEP funding for the upcoming school year. Reif said he’d be worried for his small district and its families if it were not renewed again.

“That’s the danger of putting politics into education—it becomes a bargaining chip back and forth between two sides of the aisle and schools are left to pick up the pieces,” Reif said.

But, he added, the school will always find a way to help the students, if it comes to that. “If a kid is here and a kid is hungry, we’re going to find a way to get them food,” he said.

Even if they don’t know if their food comes from a cow…or a grant.

Elliot Gotham shows his hog at the Northern Wisconsin State Fair. Photo by Salina Heller/UNN