Hungry Florida children need our support | Opinion

From 2021 to 2022, children living in food-insecure households skyrocketing from 9 million to 13 million, writes the director of No Kid Hungry Florida. Decisions made at all levels of government in the coming weeks will decide whether this problem is properly addressed.

The numbers don’t lie: Child poverty rates more than doubled from 2021 to 2022, and those living in food-insecure households drastically increased in that same time, skyrocketing from 9 million to 13 million children.

The same trends are showing up right here in Florida, with more than three-quarters of Floridians reporting it was harder to buy food this year than last, due to the rising costs of food and other essentials.

This should be a wake-up call for many decision makers. We now have some of the best tools in the toolbox to reverse this alarming trend, but we need to make sure we’re maximizing them.

During the pandemic, smart policies like the enhanced Child Tax Credit and expanded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits had an incredible impact on our communities. Unfortunately, many of these changes were short lived, and with their expiration, we are seeing increased rates of poverty and hunger.

Families are struggling to put food on the table, and as we head into a new year, both opportunities and challenges lie ahead that will have a very real impact on kids.

Though Congress averted a crisis by passing a continuing resolution to fund the government, we have many major policy decisions on the horizon that will impact millions of families. Most notably, we need lawmakers to fully fund the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, so it can continue to provide qualifying kids and moms with the resources to buy things like formula, milk and fresh produce. In Florida, WIC supports over 400,000 children, infants and moms, and without additional funding, families could face waitlists for the first time in three decades.

Amid a brutal year for food benefits, we did see a significant bipartisan win for kids in Florida and across the country: the implementation of a new permanent, nationwide option for summer meal programs. This change allowed rural schools and community organizations the flexibility to feed kids in the ways that work best for their community, like delivering meals to the home or providing meals for multiple days at a time. This is a game-changer in counties like Madison, Gulf, Taylor and even Monroe, where families may have to travel many miles to reach a summer meal site. While this decision came late for many summer meal programs, we look forward to seeing the difference it makes in children’s lives this coming summer.

We also saw exciting progress at the local level, as school nutrition teams innovated their meal programs to reach more kids.

For example, in Putnam County, the school district has implemented breakfast in the classroom in nearly 90% of their classrooms. By overcoming barriers many students may face, such as bus schedules that don’t allow a trip to the cafeteria or the stigma that can be associated with school meals, breakfast in the classroom can drastically increase participation, ensuring every student has the nutrition they need to fuel their learning. Since the program’s initiation in Putnam County, they’ve seen a major jump in participation from less than half of their students to more than 70% of students eating breakfast each day.

It’s resilient, collaborative and innovative solutions like these that make me optimistic for the upcoming year.

With many opportunities on the horizon, we are at a turning point.

Florida has just weeks to opt into an innovative solution to feeding kids during the summer by implementing Summer EBT, a new federal policy option that provides families with grocery benefits while school is out for the summer. This program alone could impact nearly 2 million kids and feed more than $230 million federal dollars into local businesses across the state. But the clock is ticking on the Jan. 1 deadline.

And federally, Congress has major policy decisions to make that will impact WIC and SNAP through the appropriations process and Farm Bill reauthorization. The latest budget extender has forestalled a federal government shutdown and kicked that fight into the New Year, but it’s far from over.

With 2024 around the corner, I hope our elected leaders recognize the impact these decisions will have on millions of families and resolve to support smart solutions that connect more kids with the nutrition they need. If we want to reverse the alarming trend in child poverty and hunger, the time is now to not only protect the programs we know work, but also improve and strengthen them as an investment in our future.

Sky Beard, of Melbourne, is director of No Kid Hungry Florida.