Emerging Issues in Child Nutrition Reauthorization

Every five years, Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR) provides Congress with an opportunity to revisit and update the child nutrition and school meal programs that it authorizes. Programs such as summer and afterschool meals, school breakfast and lunch, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) fall under this umbrella, and their implementation has changed greatly in the last few years in response to COVID-19 as well as technological changes and changing trends in areas as diverse as school food procurement and the spread of tele-health.

As Congress picks up the gauntlet of reauthorization again this year, C-FARE has assembled a panel of three experts to discuss their work and insights on priority issues around these programs that impact the lives of millions of children and families across the country:

Travis A. Smith (University of Georgia), Will Davis, (Mississippi State University), and Becca Jablonski (Colorado State University). 

This panel will feature moderation by Sean Cash, C-FARE's Board member and the Bergstrom Foundation Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.  

Travis A. Smith, from the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Georgia, kicked off the webinar with his presentation on “Aging out of the WIC program: Implications for Child Nutrition”. WIC is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children that served 7.84 million people in fiscal year 2018. Children lose WIC in the month following their 5th birthday. The focus of his presentation was to answer the question: what happens to the quality of children’s diets when they lose WIC at the age of five. 

 All states deliver food packages via electronic benefits transfer (EBT), so parents or guardians use EBT cards to redeem eligible foods such as low-fat milk, yogurt, cereals and whole grains, fruits and vegetables, cheese, eggs, and beans or peanut butter. These are also all the items that children lose when they turn five years old. Smith closes out his presentation by answering the question: What’s the cost of letting kids stay on WIC until they start kindergarten, instead of ending benefits at age 61 months? For 508,000 4-year-olds, assuming uniform births across months, food package costs would increase by $88.8 million (or about 1.7% of the current 5 billion). There are currently companion bills that purpose this called The Wise Investment in Children (WIC) Act 2021. 

Becca Jablonski, an Associate Professor and Food Systems Extension Economist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Colorado State University, continues the webinar with discussion about the importance of the National School Lunch Programs (NSLP).  The NSLP is the 2nd largest food and nutrition assistance program in the U.S. and feeds 84% of low-income, food-insecure households with school aged children. Most studies find that NSLP is associated with significantly lower rates of food insecurity for households with children, as well as improved diet quality and academic performance.  

When COVID-19 hit, schools closed and had about a weekend to make decisions about how to respond. The USDA Food and Nutrition Service provided relaxation and waivers for many of the requirements to receive reimbursements. Jablonski introduces a study called “Emergency Food Provision for Children and Families during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Examples from Five U.S. Cities”, which examined what cities did to support emergency food service provisions to children and families in need. There are also factsheets available that go into further detail about farm to school research. 

Will Davis, from the Department of Agricultural Economics at Mississippi State University, closes out the webinar with his presentation on “The Community Eligibility Provision’s Effect on Child Weight”. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) was introduced as part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, and allows schools/districts serving high percentages of low-income students to provide free lunch and breakfast to all students. Effect of CEP on child weight likely dependent on a child’s alternative meal options, meal quality, and child characteristics. Davis expects a majority of weight effects to come from three groups: children who were not FRP eligible, children who were FRP eligible but did not enroll, and children who brought meals from home.  

Some of the policy implications of this research suggests that the CEP’s effect on weight may run counter to the policy’s intended goal. Introducing universal free school meals into low-income schools with CEP actually leads to detrimental effects on child weight, however CEP does have a positive effect on academic achievement and disciplinary outcomes. Davis closes out with noting that future research needs to identify mechanisms and find ways to improve current and future universal free school meal policy.  

Q&A with the audience followed the panelists’ presentations

Questions 1

Would moving shopping online for WIC be something to be included in childhood reauthorization?

Travis: Perhaps, FNS is already looking into this. Deputy Under Secretary of USDA’s Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services Brandon Lipps said in November, 2020 “USDA is working quickly to provide more SNAP participants with the opportunity to shop for food in the same way many Americans do – online. And now we have set our sights on bringing similar innovation to WIC, continuing our commitment to best serve those who rely on our programs.”  

Will: Allowing for online WIC purchasing is an interesting idea. Recently, SNAP participating households have been allowed to use their benefits to purchase food online through the Online Purchasing Pilot program. We are still in the process of uncovering how the availability of online SNAP affects individual and household outcomes, but I think these results would help shed some light on the potential effects of an online WIC option.  

Question 2 

How do the diet quality of households who have 4-year-olds still on WIC compare to diet quality of WIC household over all? What do you think your results would look like for children who leave at the one-year mark, and could programs like Head Start mitigate that?  

Travis: our data are at the individual level (i.e., one person per household), and we therefore cannot compare diets across household members. However, observationally, 4-year-olds on WIC have slightly better diets, by about 3.3%, as compared to their WIC-eligible, nonparticipating counterparts.  

Question 3 

School meal programs are charged with both pursuing nutritional and educational goals -- "eat well and read well". How can family engagement be promoted to systemize the student’s health and education activities?  

Will: With regards to the CEP, a topic that different school administrators have brought up to me in the past is the importance of proper communication between parents and the school. For example, when universal free school meals are made available through the CEP, some parents continue sending their child to school with a brownbag meal from home, not knowing that the student is regularly eating their free school meal as well. This is an issue that I think can be mostly if not entirely prevented by communication between the school and parent, but this type of individual monitoring and communication places a considerable burden on schools that often serve hundreds of students. Aside from that, I think that schools can improve the health and learning outcomes of students by teaching both children and parents about the importance of proper nutrition and its relationship with academic success. If students are provided with the nutrition they need at school, but not at home, then they are still fighting an uphill battle.  

Becca: This is a great question, and I unfortunately do not have a good answer as this is outside of my area of expertise. That being said, I was part of a team that conducted a systematic literature review of student outcomes associated with farm to school or farm to school related activities. That research can be found here: https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/11/2/357/5561600?login=true (there may be some insights into what’s working that could be pursued outside of the school environment).

Question 4

What is the process of Childhood nutrition reauthorization? How do programs get revised?  

Travis: A bill must be proposed and work its way through the committees and chambers. It is through this process that program parameters can be revised. Absent reauthorization, the programs still operate. This is a helpful overview from the Congressional Research Service: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10266 

This program is supported in part by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, and the National Agricultural Statistics Service. 

Those who register but cannot attend our webinar can always view a recording of it later at the council’s YouTube channel.