Feeding all the children.
Happy First Day of School!
Starting today, every one of the 49,000 students in Seattle Public Schools gets breakfast and lunch for free, every single day of school. No one has to qualify. No dividing line between the kiddos whose families pay and those whose don’t.
That matters most at a specific set of schools. SPS already served free meals at 51 schools through existing federal and state programs — the ones in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of poverty. But 53 schools didn’t, and the city estimates more than 6,800 food insecure kids attend those schools.
Those are the children that fall through the cracks. But no more.
You might remember that last fall, Seattle voters approved the $1.3 billion Families, Education, Preschool and Promise levy. (The “FEPP” levy.) Mayor Wilson’s spending plan made universal school meals a signature item.
Universal > Means-Tested
I’ve written before about why universal programs are better than the “efficient” means-tested approach; school meals make a clean case for why.
Means testing requires paperwork, and paperwork is a filter that screens out exactly the families we want to reach — immigrant parents wary of handing their information to the government, hourly workers who don’t have time to spend on forms, and families whose income might mean they qualify in October and fail to do so in February. It draws a line in the cafeteria between the kids who pay and the kids who don’t, which most teachers can tell you is its own kind of punishment.
From a budgeting perspective, means testing costs much more to administer - money that should be going into feeding kids, not figuring out who to feed. And politics are much more favorable for universal programming. A program everybody uses is a program everybody defends. That’s why Social Security, and Medicare are much better funded and less likely to get cut than Medicaid, Food Stamps, and Rental Assistance. Means-tested benefits get whittled away in lean budget years precisely because most voters have no stake in them.
The Council Fought the People
On July 22nd, Council President Joy Hollingsworth and Councilmember Dionne Foster brought an amendment to delay universal meals a full year and redirect the money to a means-tested food assistance program.
Do the arithmetic on the swap. The vouchers ran $500,000 a year for up to 5,000 families. That’s about a hundred dollars per family per year — two bucks a week — in place of feeding every child in the district every day.
Despite intense lobbying, lopsided testimonial, and a serious grassroots effort to stop the amendment, it passed by an overwhelming margin of six to three .
Voting for the means-tested delay: Dionne Foster, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, Dan Strauss, Bob Kettle and Debora Juarez.
Voting no: Eddie Lin and Alexis Mercedes Rinck, which is exactly what I’d expect from both of these stalwart progressives. (Thank you!).
The welcome surprise was the no vote from the more conservative Rob Saka. Saka shared a story from his own experience that brought the burden of means testing to life:
We qualified for free and reduced lunch, which means we also would have likely qualified for Medicaid,” Saka said. “But I never went to the dentist and only went to the doctor a handful of times in nine years because of the severe, significant, non-trivial, and substantial administrative paperwork burden imposed on people that need these valuable resources.
Then the the people showed up.
The backlash against that vote was ferocious. Parents, teachers, PTA folks, food security advocates, and a lot of people who have never testified about anything in their lives put the council on notice.
And the People Won.
It took one day. On July 23rd, Hollingsworth, Foster and Strauss came back with a plan to fund universal meals starting this fall after all. Wilson pushed back on pulling it from a general fund “already facing a $175 million deficit,” and the city landed on unused money from an affordable housing project instead — funding the meals and the vouchers. The cost for this amazing benefit is a rounding error in the city’s budget - $3.3 million in year one, $4.7 million in year two.
That reversal doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when a mayor builds a base of people who expect this city to be affordable for working families, and then an issue comes along so obvious that it catches fire well beyond the usual political crowd. Nobody on that dais wanted to be on the receiving end of that backlash.
A people-powered movement and a people-powered mayor pulling in the same direction, and every kid in Seattle eats today because of it.
You love to see it.