As COVID meal waivers are set to expire, River Valley is asking the community to speak up

As the federal meal waivers from the USDA as authorized by Congress come to a close following the COVID-19 pandemic, River Valley is asking the community to contact its state and national representatives to ask for more time.

The waivers, which allowed for districts like River Valley to provide free meals to their students throughout the pandemic despite not reaching the preexisting threshold for offering 100% free and reduced-price lunches, are to to expire June 30 or the end of the school year, whatever comes first.

With the last day of school rapidly approaching, Superintendent Adam Wickham is asking for community members to reach out to their representatives in Congress to request the waivers be extended after seeing an 80% increase from before the pandemic in the number of students eating school meals simply because they have been free of charge.

“If the waivers do go away, obviously, we would see a large number of students who are taking advantage of free breakfast and lunch right now would be impacted. We are trying to reach out to our representatives and senators at the federal level and trying to encourage those waivers to be extended,” Wickham said.

As a district, River Valley has just over 30% of its students who qualify for free and reduced-price meals, but all students were able to be provided a free meal over the past two years as a result of these federal waivers.

River Valley Food Service Director Brent Herdman explained his top priority is making sure kids have food available to best grow academically, socially and emotionally, and the meal waivers worked to get students to eat the healthy meals his team provides because it was available to them both free of charge and free of the stigma free and reduced-price meals often carry.

“We saw the amount of kids that we were able to serve during that period, when we no longer had to worry about free and reduced applications and things like that. At this point I kind of feel like, ‘Look at all this information that we’ve learned, and we’re just going to turn our back to it?” Herdman said.

If the waivers are not extended, the district will be forced to return to charging families once again and needing parents to fill out the applications for the free and reduced-price meal program.

“We were really hoping that the waivers would have been extended one more year, which would have given us some time to look at some other options, and as a school district, we don’t really have a lot of options: how do we roll it in? Do we roll it into school fees? Do we roll it into a prepayment system?” he said.

Wickham said the two ways the community can help are for parents to fill out the school lunch assistance form for the coming school year to make sure students have access to the program if they qualify.

“One thing we’re looking at if they do go away is to really encourage parents to fill out the assistance form for free-reduced lunches, because that’s the determination if we qualify in other ways, so we definitely want to see that,” he said.

With the chance the federal waivers could be extended as other districts from across the state speaking up alongside them, River Valley is asking for help.

“The most immediate is to contact your national representatives: Representative Troy Balderson, Representative Jim Jordan, Senators Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman. Just express if you do believe this is a worthwhile program," Wickham said.

"I don’t believe anyone likes big government programs, and a lot of time there is government waste that we don’t like, but feeding our children is something we can probably all agree on is worthwhile."

Story by: Sophia Veneziano (740) 564 - 5243 | sveneziano@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Marion Star: River Valley is asking the community to speak up as meal waivers end