I worked to the bone to get the Legislature to feed Idaho kids. They wouldn’t budge | Opinion
One thing I have learned this legislative session: Legislators have knowingly and willingly used misinformation, blatant lies and “conservative values” to kill two line items in the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, and State Department of Education’s respective budgets.
This takes viciousness to an entirely new level. Our conservative legislature, who are supposed to work for the people who elected them, prefer to legislate on the backs of poor, hungry and marginalized Idahoans.
These budgets included a line item in each providing for the one-time administrative cost of implementing Summer EBT in Idaho. When schools closed in March 2020 in response to the pandemic, 30 million children lost access to the free and reduced-price school meals that help reduce childhood hunger, support health and ease the pressure on household food budgets.
Congress created the Pandemic EBT program to replace the school breakfasts and lunches families lost when schools closed. The program provided an EBT card with grocery benefits to families whose children are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals.
Summer EBT is a program that was created out of the lessons learned from the pandemic regarding school kids who were not able to receive their free or reduced meals due to schools being closed, and the Summer Food Service Program (which funds Picnic in the Park) being on hold because no one was congregating at parks during the pandemic.
Between 2020 and 2023, Pandemic EBT helped reduce food insecurity and it is estimated to have lifted between 2.7 and 3.9 million children out of hunger. For the 2020-2021 school year, Pandemic EBT reduced food insufficiency among Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program households by 28%.
Summer EBT has some pretty specific and concrete rules that can be found in the Federal Register.
Regardless of your school or district, community eligibility for Summer EBT is entirely based on income. This was never, and is not, universal free meals for every single child in Idaho. It is not universal anything. If a parent or guardian makes six figures a year, their children will not qualify.
No, children will not be given an EBT card for their own personal use for shopping.
No, children cannot go into a liquor store and buy a Monster drink.
Yes. Summer EBT helps lift children out of hunger and feed them.
Yes, this helps people pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
We hear, ad nauseum: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” That’s a fantastic idea, but we need to feed people while they are learning how to fish.
We hear, again, ad nauseum, “Why should I feed them? They aren’t my kids. If you can’t take care of your kids, then don’t have them.”
No parent can predict what their day-to-day circumstances are going to look like over the next 18 years. These children — the ones our conservative legislature and citizens don’t want to help and feed — are our kids. They are the children who will be running Idaho in the future, so perhaps we need to do something to ensure their future, therefore ensuring Idaho’s future.
When these children are running Idaho, they will be making the laws, and they will be making decisions about your geriatric life when you are in retirement. When conservative Idahoans and legislators are in their geriatric years, do you really want these now-adults to say, “Why should I feed them, they aren’t my parents or grandparents. If you can’t take care of your own parents or grandparents, then let them die.”
I do hope that our youth can and will do better than their predecessors. Children, due to their parents’ unforeseen and situational circumstances, do not choose to go hungry. Their families need a hand up.
Summer EBT would have done exactly that, a hand-up while learning how to fish. Ending hunger really does lift us all.
Dawn Pierce is a Boise resident, national community organizing manager for Hunger Free America, board president for the Idaho Hunger Relief Task Force, and a fierce advocate for anti-hunger and anti-poverty programs.
