MARTINSVILLE —Samantha McKee sat in a hallway of Martinsville High School on Friday while her two sons, Isaac and Rylee, ate their food. She watched them. Deli pinwheels, celery sticks, peanut butter cups, and frozen swirl cups were on the menu. Isaac and Rylee sat and ate with their friends. Occasionally, McKee would apply some motherly discipline, asking them to sit still and eat their food.
She has been coming to the Martinsville summer lunch program for the past six years.
If the program went away, she said, it would hurt her children.
“We would still make it, but it would be a little bit harder,” McKee said. “It’s just a good program. I really wish they wouldn’t take it away.”
Allison Johnson had just been in that same hallway. She has been bringing her son, Isaiah, with her almost every day since it kicked off late last month. Without the program, Johnson said, her children wouldn’t get as many healthful meals. “They would still eat, but they wouldn’t have a fruit, vegetable, and a protein and bread,” Johnson said. “It would be mac and cheese and a hot dog.”
Statewide issue
The arrival of warmer weather brings time out of school for Indiana children. But it also brings an increased fight against a tough problem — child hunger.
And it’s a battle that Tami Silverman is fighting.
“Many of our kids access free and reduced (price) lunch and school breakfast programs,” said Silverman, executive director and CEO of the Indiana Youth Institute. When school is not in session, “they don’t have that consistent food supply.”
Silverman said she spent time talking with her son about the problem one night. She asked him to count to five and explained that one out of every five children have no food or not enough food.
“That’s crazy, Mom,” her son said.
Silverman said 15 percent of Hoosier households are “food insecure,” which amounts to 20 percent of children. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as “lack of access, at times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members and limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate foods.”
“It just means their food supply is uncertain or may be limited due to economic conditions,” Silverman said. “And physical limitations. They might not have access where they live to healthier foods.”
To fight the problem, Silverman said, families are often forced to make hard choices. Silverman said food-insecure families often buy cheaper food that is less nutritious. They also eat food that is past peak freshness, and water down food and drinks to stretch them as far as possible.
They also make trade-offs in other areas of life.
“It’s very common to choose between food or paying their utilities, or paying for medical bills, or transportation, or education,” Silverman said. “Those are really hard choices.
“Also, at times, adults will forgo food to make sure their kids have it. That’s something to keep in mind. It brings it home what a critical issue this is.”
But these actions aren’t solutions, and Silverman said such actions have long-term ramifications that can affect every aspect of a child’s life.
“We have kids who aren’t well nourished, don’t perform as well in school,” Silverman said. “Their body weight isn’t in the range of healthy. Their social skills can be affected. They have higher risk for chronic health conditions. They tend to have more behavior problems. They tend to miss more school.”
Silverman said Indiana’s food insecurity rate is consistent with national averages. At 15 percent, Indiana is currently ranked 21st.
“We haven’t changed much, but it’s still a lot of folks,” Silverman said. “Getting those basic healthy building blocks into kids is really important.”
Food insecurity
IYI statistics show that food insecurity rates are high in households with incomes near or below the poverty line and in single-parent households with children.
Another factor is transportation — nationwide, 91 percent of food-secure families have access to their own vehicles, while 70 percent of food-insecure families do not. Other food-insecure families live in “food deserts,” which are low-income areas where residents live at least 10 miles from a grocery store or supermarket. These families often rely on smaller grocery stores, which have higher prices and fewer products, often not carrying much in the way of fresh foods.
“The more people are stretched financially, the more that affects their ability to provide,” Silverman said.
Emily Bryant, executive director of Feeding Indiana's Hungry, said hunger is largely a result of poverty. But Bryant said numbers show hunger is most closely linked with falling wages.
“What we’ve seen in Indiana and across the country is that there are folks living in low-income households, which we have always seen, but we’ve also seen families working hard but not earning as much as they have been,” Bryant said. “A lot of what we’re seeing is a response to what kind of income a household has and whether they have enough left after their monthly bills to buy food for their family.”
Bryant said there has been an increase in families seeking help in the charitable sector.
“While these programs are intended to supplement, it’s not a big enough supplement,” Bryant said.
Volunteers pitching in
The situation is not hopeless, though. Silverman is encouraged by the number of summer programs available for children. She said there will be 1,400 sites in 80 Indiana counties this summer. A vast majority of those are run by volunteers. She encourages the public to get involved, because one of the problems is lack of awareness about the programs. The U.S. Department of Education, she said, is working diligently to make sure everybody knows about them.
“They are food banks, churches, that kind of thing,” Silverman said. “The idea is that there is something all of us can do. Those food banks can stretch a dollar like it’s nobody’s business.”
Silverman said donations of canned food items are always welcome at food banks. Monetary donations, though, are the most valuable because food banks can buy in bulk. Silverman said bringing that one-in-five number into focus and asking what it means for communities is a key step forward.
“It really is compelling to say, ‘How can we all come together?’” Silverman said. “How can we as a community build those up to make sure the kids are getting the resources they need?”
Rokita bill a concern
The National School Lunch Program was signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1946. The program subsidizes paid, free and reduced-cost meals in public and private schools.
In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act into law. The Community Eligibility Provision, which allows school districts to offer free meals to all students without requiring individual eligibility determinations, is part of it. If 40 percent of students in a school are directly certified, that school can offer free and discounted lunches to all of the students.
But H.R. 5003, a congressional bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Ind., seeks to change that. Under the bill, which passed committee on May 18, the threshold would be raised to 60 percent, which, critics say, would make it harder for students to receive free and reduced-price lunches.
“It’s a step backward,” Bryant said. “This program was created to eliminate the red tape and to streamline the process and to make the process less bureaucratically heavy. This is just moving the other direction.”
Bryant said the current law makes the process easier for families and schools, cutting the paperwork needed to get families enrolled.
“It’s making great strides to allow attention on feeding the kids and providing the educational services they need,” Bryant said. “These programs are doing a tremendous amount of good. They are serving a lot of children across the country.”
Bryant said Rokita’s proposal would affect 120 Indiana schools and at least 58,000 children by rejecting several schools that are currently eligible for CEP. Those students would no longer be eligible under the new requirement. It would also restrict the amount of outreach schools can do. There are currently no restrictions.
“It would eliminate the time per year they can do that,” Bryant said. “That seems counterintuitive.”
“We don’t want to roll back any of the progress that is being made,” Bryant added. “These programs are fantastic. We just don’t see a need to make significant cuts.”