School Lunch Politics (29 page)

The free lunch mandate challenged longstanding interpretations of the National School Lunch Program's mission. In California, for example, a newly emboldened conservative movement pushed for dramatic reductions in state spending. When the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a $4 million subsidy for school breakfast and lunch programs, the recently elected governor, Ronald Reagan, cut all but $500,000 and earmarked this for a pilot program rather than for general use by poor children.
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California Rural Legal Assistance immediately sued the state in U.S. District Court, contending that the 1946 School Lunch Act promised every needy child a free lunch. T. W. Martz, Stanislaus County counsel, rejected that interpretation, insisting that the state was under no obligation to provide free lunches to all children on welfare. It had never been the intent of the School Lunch Act, Martz asserted, to provide free meals to all needy children. Martz appealed to the School Lunch Act's now aging sponsor Richard Russell, who agreed that free lunches had been intended “to go to the neediest children” only “to the extent of available funds.” Russell bemoaned the program's recent transformation, saying, “I have always favored leaving as much control as possible to the local school boards and it never occurred to me that the welfare department or the courts would undertake to classify the individual children as participants.”
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The California Rural Legal Assistance attorney declared this interpretation to be an example of “insensitivity, indifference, ineptness, and inertia.” The only way a needy child could be assured of a free, nutritious lunch in California, he asserted, “is to be arrested for a serious crime and confined to a juvenile detention center” where meals were provided.
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Ultimately, the free lunch provisions were upheld and the court ordered the Secretary of Agriculture to provide food for children in sixteen California counties that had refused to establish lunch programs.

Securing state funding for school lunches solved only half of the problem. Eigibility and dignity were different matters entirely. Free lunch children in all parts of the country were still required to stand in separate lines, eat different meals, and, in some instances, work for their lunches. In Kansas City, hunger activists took the school board to court, challenging its policy of requiring poor children to work for their meals.
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In Chicago, Jesse Jackson charged that local officials “established eligibility rules, administrative policies, budgetary limitations, and school reimbursement procedures” that were inconsistent with the federal requirement of providing free meals to all needy children. In a similar lawsuit, the Boston Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights charged the school board with “non-response” to federal guidelines.
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The major stumbling block in the way of enforcing national standards for eligibility and service in school lunch programs were entrenched patterns of racism and states' rights interests. When it came to public schools and education, even congressional liberals were reluctant to go very far with federal standards. The Department of Agriculture and its congressional oversight committees had long refrained from becoming involved in the behavior of school officials. When anti-hunger activist Charles Remsberg questioned Department of Agriculture official Keith Keely about the “obvious departures” from federal guidelines, Keely replied, “We don't tell them [local officials] how to do it. We can't dictate to them.”
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The program's founders, Allen Ellender and Richard Russell, in particular, had insisted that school lunch programs steer clear of any involvement in educational issues for fear of threats to the racially segregated school system. Both Russell and Ellender still sat on key committees and did what they could to contain calls to turn school lunches into poverty programs.

Allen Ellender now chaired the Senate Agriculture Committee and vigorously rejected the idea that a federal agency should set the terms for local operation of school lunch programs. He insisted that local officials knew best how to administer the program and how to decide which children were needy. In a revealing exchange with Martha Grass, a Marland, Oklahoma, welfare rights activist, Ellender clearly found her demands incomprehensible. When Grass asked the senator why poor kids were not receiving free lunches, Ellender told her it was a matter of state assistance. Grass refused to accept that argument. Ellender admitted that “there is something out of place at the local level.” But, he added, “don't blame the Federal government.” Grass pressed him on who was responsible for feeding poor children, but Ellender responded with a constitutional disquisition saying it was the executive branch, not Congress, that had the responsibility to administer the laws. Grass clearly did not care which branch of government provided free lunches as long as poor children were fed at school. “You have so many branches,” she told the senator, “no wonder we are going hungry.”
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Ellender was frustrated and confounded by local authorities who, as he saw it, simply chose not to sufficiently supplement federal resources. When, for example, the Boston School Board failed to meet federal guidelines for free lunches, Ellender could not understand why an affluent city like Boston did not put sufficient funds into “helping the poor.” Why, he asked welfare rights activist Patrice Twigg, would “you expect the Federal Government to barge in and force the States to operate school lunch programs?” Twigg tried to explain the city's at-large electoral system in which advocates for the poor had little chance of winning electoral majorities. What is more, she said, local administrators often do not recognize the poor “as being people.” Ellender dismissed Twigg's complaint asking why, if local activists were unhappy with local officials, they did not simply “throw them out of office?” Twigg fired back, “We need someone from the Federal level.”
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Despite Ellender's long support for the National School Lunch Program, he had never intended to see it turn into a poverty program. Indeed, in his view, the new demands for free lunches were undermining what had been a highly successful agricultural surplus program that also provided nutrition for children. In truth, Ellender did not believe in free lunches. He was convinced that people who demanded free meals were basically free-loading on the government. This attitude, predictably, drew the ire of welfare activists and free lunch advocates. Gloria Atchinson, a member of the Detroit Committee for the Hungry Child, for example, challenged the senator's characterization of poor people as free-loaders. “Most people,” she said, “have a lot of pride and they want to be able to pay for their lunches.” However, she insisted, even if poor parents could not pay for their children's lunches, they deserved to be treated respectfully by their government and by public officials.
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Reports of free lunch protests and lawsuits revealed that discrimination in school lunchrooms was a national problem. Lawsuits against urban school districts, in particular, dramatically illustrated the extent to which public resources were unequally distributed even outside the racially segregated South. Particularly when it came to education, northern cities found themselves accused of “de facto” segregation and racial discrimination. In Boston, for example, a new city-wide electoral system, inaugurated during the 1950s, resulted in racial exclusion just as the black population of the city increased. By the middle 1960s, school desegregation proved as divisive in the North as it had been in southern states. As Detroit's Superintendent of Public Schools, William Simons, observed, “there is only one local unit of government where the welfare of children is dependent upon the whims of the voters and that is the public schools.”
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Still, Leslie Dunbar, co-chair of the Citizens Board of Inquiry, insisted that the school lunch critiques, including “Hunger USA,” were pro-states' rights. The reports, he pointed out, “might even stimulate states to do more for their needy citizens than the law requires.” At the very least, Dunbar hoped federal standards of eligibility would “require the observance of necessary minimums and would vest in every individual the right to such.”
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Despite ever more direct criticism by anti-hunger and civil rights activists, the Department of Agriculture only reluctantly issued standards and guidelines for free lunch programs. Indeed, it was not until 1971 that the Secretary of Agriculture released a clear set of guidelines. Reiterating the responsibility of every school participating in the National School Lunch Program to serve free meals to all poor children in its district, the department finally enumerated minimum income standards for free lunch eligibility and uniform reimbursement rates for federally subsidized meals.
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The initial income requirements for free meals was set at 100 percent of the federal poverty line. The federal standards, however, actually threatened to exclude many of the “near poor” from receiving free meals. In New York, for example, with one of the nation's most generous free meal programs, the income eligibility cut-off was $4,250. Because federal funds would reimburse the state only for families under federal “poverty line,” which was only $3,940 that year, school officials estimated that several thousand children would be left out of the program. Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer warned, “No one who has followed this issue would have expected the Administration to interpret ‘needy' to exclude people who are poor but not quite that destitute.”
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This, combined with the declining participation of full-paying children as the price of meals went up, threatened the entire structure of the school lunch program.

School lunch administrators greeted the free lunch guidelines with considerable ambivalence. While they generally endorsed the expansion of meal offerings to poor children, they feared lawmakers—and the public—would lose sight of the nutrition needs of all children, regardless of social status. Echoing the sentiments of early twentieth-century nutritionists and home economists, school administrators reminded lawmakers that malnutrition threatened all children, whether their families were rich or poor. Norma Goff, director of food service for Ridley Township, Pennsylvania, for example, told President Johnson that “children from families in an income bracket that can afford the school lunch frequently have poorer food habits than those coming from low income families.”
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Indeed, school lunch professionals increasingly worried that the attention to poor children was threatening the idea of universal child nutrition. When President Johnson threatened to cut the general school lunch budget, even as he approved funds for free meals, the ASFSA and the American Parents Committee mounted a national lobbying campaign urging the president not to feed the poor at the expense of other children. John Gehn, superintendent of the Gilman, Wisconsin, Joint School District No. 2, warned LBJ that “changing these fine programs to include only needy children would be a big mistake.” Gehn worried that the new guidelines would lead more children to be identified as “needy,” but that “it has been my experience that the less identification of this type the better it is for all concerned.”
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Jerry Peterson, superintendent of the Story City, Iowa, Community Schools, told the president, “It doesn't make sense to create new programs … by taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another.”
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The message from school administrators was clear. They did not want the National School Lunch Program to turn into a program for poor children. In their view, all children needed a nutritious lunch.

The threat to paying children revealed a fundamental tension within the program and within American social programs generally. The National School Lunch Program's remarkable popular support rested on the assumption that every child who wanted a nutritious meal could receive one. Indeed, the program was designed as a welfare program for farmers and had traditionally operated as a benefit for middle- and working-class families who could pay a subsidized price for their children's meals. Senate sponsor Richard Russell, for one, insisted that “the School Lunch Act was passed for all children (not just the needy).”
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Russell's liberal Senate colleagues similarly asserted the program's universal intent. New York's Jacob Javits, for example, declared that the School Lunch Act of 1946 “was never intended to be a poor person's lunch program.” The purpose, Javits said, was to ensure adequate nutrition for children regardless of whether they were rich or poor. Children's health, Javits believed, “is an important national asset.”
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Congressional advocates as well as school lunch professionals feared that a singular focus on the needy would spell the end of the program's “traditional” goal of providing nutrition for all children. Liberal Senator and anti-poverty advocate Carl Perkins warned, “We have to be most careful not to price the middle-class child out of the lunchroom.”
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ASFSA executive director John Perryman similarly worried that if child nutrition programs became part of overall educational or welfare appropriations, it would spell “a total disaster” for the school lunch program.
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Perryman opposed turning the program into welfare. “Our nation's educational history abounds with evidence that public education … faltered and failed so long as it confined itself to the pauper's offspring,” he said.
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Holding to the ideal of a universal school lunch program, the ASFSA fought against shifting the program's focus to welfare.
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The National Education Association also favored a universal system. In 1970, NEA president George Fisher observed, “I don't distinguish between money for school lunches and money for all other things we need in education Ahotlunch program shouldn't be a free lunch for the poor. It should be a free lunch for all children.”
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Nonetheless, the trend was set. By the early 1970s, as one historian noted, the school lunch program had moved “from an outlet for farm surpluses to a small convenience for part of the middle class to an important welfare benefit for children of the poor.”
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