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During the school year, thousands of students from low-income families are fed by the city’s free and reduced lunch program. Although the service continues over summer break, the number of meals that reached students during that time last year has declined, according to a report by the Food Research & Action Center.
In the annual document released yesterday, titled Hunger Doesn’t Take a Vacation, the center notes that the District saw a 10 percent decrease in the average number of summer meals distributed to children during the summer of 2015 from the year before.
Beverley Wheeler of D.C. Hunger Solutions is asking the District to step up its efforts. “By doing so, we can ensure more children at risk of hunger across the District return to school in the fall healthy and ready to learn,” she said in a release from the center.
Compared to the national average, though, D.C. is doing a stellar job, the report also points out. In the District, summer meals reached 22,185 students who received school lunch during the 2014-2015 academic year. That’s a rate of 59 children out of every 100, compared to 15.8 children out of every 100 nationally.
The center, which advocates for ending hunger throughout the country, measured participation during the month of July, when children are usually out of school and risk not receiving healthy meals.
D.C., in fact, had the highest ratio compared to the 50 states. It was followed by New Mexico, Vermont, New York, and Connecticut in the top five. Conversely, 11 states fed summer meals to less than one in 10 of their low-income children in July 2015, the lowest places being Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Kentucky.
The city’s free summer meals program is run by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. In regard to the decline, Elisabeth Sweeting of the superintendent’s office told DCist that it may have to do with less sites and sponsors participating last year. She also adds that sponsors come through several avenues and some of them may not have been accounted for in the report, however, “children are still receiving the meals.”
According to the report, the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation is the program’s largest sponsor with more than 200 sites receiving summer meals.
As Sweeting is currently reviewing applications, weeding out sites that don’t meet the department’s criteria, she isn’t sure how many organizations are participating this summer. Meanwhile, she says, the agency is continuing their efforts to raise awareness of the service.
