The Arby's Foundation announced a gift Thursday after reports that about 700 students in Decatur City Schools soon would receive cheese sandwiches instead of regular meals at lunch.
Lake Forest Elementary School is among 31 Fulton County Schools enjoying the benefit of breakfast and lunch at the school for all students at no charge.
Across the country, schools are reporting rising cafeteria debt, and fewer kids are enrolling in their free and reduced price programs. Many states are moving to make meals free for all kids again.
The national study found a small but significant decline in the average BMI of more than 14,000 schoolkids after implementation of a 2010 federal law that boosted nutrition standards for school meals.
Federal funding helped schools provide free lunch to all students regardless of income for most of the pandemic, but now that Congress has let that funding expire, students once again have to apply for free or reduced price lunch. That change has some worried about whether kids in Georgia schools are getting enough to eat, or whether schools will once again start putting families in debt over their daily school meals. GPB's Peter Biello spoke about this with Alessandra Ferrara-Miller, founder of All For Lunch, a nonprofit dedicated to wiping out lunch debt.
Georgia recently joined 22 other states in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They’re pushing back against federal guidelines around school lunch funding as schools open across Georgia.
Recent increases in food insecurity are not going away despite declines in COVID-19. The United States Department of Agriculture says roughly 12% of Georgia families do not have enough to eat.
A boost in funds and flexibility in how food is prepared and packaged was a lifeline for kids coping with hunger. But these measures, passed in response to COVID-19, expire in June, with no extension.
Unpredictable things happen to us all the time. As part of our annual You 2.0 series on personal growth and reinvention, we revisit two of our favorite stories of loss and the change it brings.
The federal Farm Bill making its way through Congress could dramatically reduce the availability of free school meals. Those meals offer significant...
