Advocates for low-income children are asking lawmakers to fund administrative costs in 2025 for a federal summer feeding program, but its absence in the state education budget doesn’t appear to be an oversight.
For about $15 million from the state, about 545,000 children would receive $40 per month for three months over the summer in federal funding.
The state participated in the program when it was launched nationally during the height of COVID-19. It missed a deadline to participate in the program this year and state funding isn’t in the 2025 budget proposal Gov. Kay Ivey sent lawmakers in February.
“Alabama fully participated in the program during the pandemic years, the time for which the program was created and intended,” Gina Maiola, a spokeswoman for Ivey, told Alabama Daily News on Monday. “Now, in 2024, the pandemic is behind us, and federal changes have significantly increased the state’s cost to administer it.”
The federal funding represents a significant return on the state’s investment, said Alabama Arise hunger policy advocate LaTrell Clifford Wood.
The federal government pays a dollar-for-dollar match for administering the program and then all of the food benefits, which are delivered to families on debit cards. Arise says 545,000 children will miss meals this summer. Multiplied by $120, that’s $64.8 million.
“That would effectively mean helping to bolster our economy and help feed our children,” Clifford Wood said.
Feeding America is another advocate for continued state funding.
The Associated Press early this year reported that Alabama was one of 14 states that wouldn’t participate in the program in 2024. The federal government launched pilot versions in 2011, expanded it nationally during the pandemic and then Congress made it permanent within a spending bill adopted in December 2022. States must split the administrative costs 50/50, and the federal government funds the benefits, which are expected to cost $2.5 billion this year and help feed 21 million children. Another 10 million eligible kids live in states that turned down the funding.
Alabama officials said missing out on the 2024 federal funding was a deadline issue.
The $9.3 billion 2025 ETF and related education spending bills are ready this week for a vote in the Alabama House today.
In a column this week, Arise staff said some in-person summer feeding programs exist in Alabama, they only reach 6% of the kids who need the meals.
Clifford Wood said barriers to those programs can include limited hours of availability and transportation.
“If we have money for corporate tax breaks, we have money to feed our children,” she said.