Casey highlights plan to combat child food insecurity, serves lunch to kids at Greater Scranton YMCA

Jul. 16—DUNMORE — U.S. Sen. Bob Casey distributed bagged lunches to summer day campers Friday at the Greater Scranton YMCA, where he addressed the issue of child food insecurity and policy proposals to reduce it.

Early last year, the Democratic senator introduced his Five Freedoms for America's Children, an ambitious set of policy recommendations to improve the lives and potential of American youth. Among the five freedoms Casey contends the country should guarantee all children is freedom from hunger, an issue exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A nearly 50-page document Casey shared outlining his five freedoms plan notes food insecurity for households with children tripled during the pandemic. It cites Feeding America projections showing approximately one in four American children, or 17 million in total, were food insecure in 2020.

Those and other alarming statistics underscore the importance of programs and organizations, including the Greater Scranton YMCA, that provide meals to children, Casey said.

"This is an example here where children are receiving meals during the summer — in the case of this program a lunch and a snack — and for many of them this might be the core or the most important meal of their day or the only meal for some children," Casey said of the Y's summer day camp. "It's critical that we take existing feeding programs and hunger programs and have them better funded or expanded."

The Scranton School District provides a daily snack and lunches for the roughly 75 to 100 kids attending the YMCA's summer day camp at any given time. The day camp runs for 10 weeks and eventually transitions into the other programs for kids during the school year, Greater Scranton YMCA President and CEO Trish Fisher said.

Children in the Y's early learning and child care programs receive breakfast, two snacks and a lunch daily, Fisher said, noting the organization distributes hundreds of meals a week for kids.

The freedom from hunger element of Casey's plan includes proposals to automatically certify more children for school meal programs and expand universal school lunch and breakfast. Those and other proposals would result in more eligible children certified to receive free school meals, less administrative work for schools and fewer hungry students, according to the plan document.

The other four freedoms include the freedom to be healthy, freedom to be economically secure, freedom to learn and freedom to be safe from harm. Each comes with its own set of policy recommendations, from expanding investments in child abuse prevention to making all children eligible for health care coverage through Medicaid.

Casey, who spent time after his remarks shooting baskets with day campers and chatting with YMCA officials, argued President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan pandemic relief package laid a foundation for future investments to improve the lives of children and families.

Biden has also proposed major investments in children and families through his American Families Plan, and Casey expects many of his five freedoms policy recommendations to be weaved in as Biden's plan is shaped into legislation. Senate Democrats released this week the blueprint for a $3.5 trillion budget resolution bill that will include American Families Plan policy proposals and other Democratic priorities.

"We have to make sure that we address the needs of children with that three-and-a-half-trillion dollar kind of framework that was outlined this week," Casey said, adding later "there's so many areas that we can positively impact the life of a child, and we have to take action now."

Contact the writer: jhorvath@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9141; @jhorvathTT on Twitter.