Feeding kids, boosting local economies

 I've spent a chunk of the last seven or eight years working intermittently on child nutrition issues, which has a certain amount of irony. After all, the organization I work for, the American Friends Service Committee, first came to West Virginia in 1922, in large part to work on child nutrition issues. 

How sad is it that it's still an issue year 99 years later?

It's an unfortunate truth that today  a lot of kids rely heavily on schools for meeting their nutrition needs, up to and including volunteer weekend backpack programs. 

I first got involved in 2013 when the state legislature passed the Feed to Achieve Act, which was intended to eventually provide free breakfast and lunch for all public school students. One way that would work was by encouraging more counties to implement the federal Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which allows them to provide free meals to all students in schools where 40 percent or more are certified as being low income. Basically, it eliminates the application process for free and reduced meals.

It's a winner all round. More kids eat (mostly) healthy meals, which can help with learning, discipline, tardiness and attendance. Schools cut paperwork and often save money. Any stigma for being on free or reduced meals is gone. And working parents get a break. 

Most counties jumped on board as soon as the program became available and others followed suit through the years. Some took some nudging, sometimes for years. But now, 54 out of 55 counties have implemented the program to a degree and 43 have done so on a countywide basis. Often, a county would try it at a few schools and then expand it after seeing the benefits. And the WV Office of Child Nutrition has done a great job in helping to make all this happen.

Enter COVID-19. Last spring, the USDA provided pandemic electronic benefit cards (P-EBTs) worth $313.50 per child to all students to help cover out of school food costs. In schools with CEP, all kids get the benefits; in those without, only those on free or reduced lunch qualify. Many benefitted but some missed out.

This is where child nutrition translates into direct economic impact. That round of P-EBTs brought around $72 million to local economies in the midst of a pandemic-induced recession. The USDA estimates that each dollar spent on EBT food assistance has a multiplier effect of  $1.5, which would increase the economic boost to $108 million.

The USDA recently announced a second round of P-EBT cards to be issued next month. The benefit will amount to $6.82 per day for days out of school in the 2020-2021 school year. That means somebody's going to have to do some arithmetic and the amount may vary from child to child depending on how the number of in-school days. It's been estimated that this will bring $200 million to the state, which with the multiplier means $300 million in much needed economic activity.

That's good news, or at least a silver lining to the pandemic. Still, more needs to be done to encourage the expansion of CEP. And we need to revisit legislation that died the last two years that would require counties to come up with out of school food plans for emergencies and summer vacations. Last year, the bill died just as the pandemic began to hit. One would hope that the need for such legislation would be self evident this year.

More not all bad

This op-ed of mine on WV's recent gains in child nutrition ran in today's Gazette-Mail:

Now that we’re officially back to school, some folks out there may have noticed that more kids are eating school meals and are doing so at no cost to families. As I’ll try to show below, that’s a big deal and a good thing for lots of reasons.

In West Virginia, where we’re used to leading the pack on the bad lists and bringing up the rear on good ones, we’ve even taken the lead on an important child nutrition measure.

For the last two years, our state has led the nation in school breakfast participation. We even beat ourselves by 9 percent in the most recent year. What this means is that over 82 percent of low-income kids in the state received free school breakfasts, compared with a national average of just 54.3 percent.

One reason for the increase was the passage in 2013 of the Feed to Achieve Act, which had broad bipartisan support. One thing the bill did was require schools to offer innovative ways of delivering breakfast to kids.

The old way of doing it, before classes began, just wasn’t cutting it. New ways included grab and go breakfasts, breakfasts after first period and breakfasts in the classroom. And they proved to be a hit.

Some friends of mine have done the math and they found that our state served 5.88 million more breakfasts last year than in 2013.

More schools statewide are also taking advantage of the federal Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which allows schools to provide free meals to all students in schools where 40 percent or more of students are low-income.

That provision can help improve child nutrition, along with improving learning and reducing discipline problems. It also gives a break to working parents, removes issues of stigma, and can save schools time and money on paperwork.

Feed to Achieve and CEP complement each other. As innovative ways of delivering breakfasts increase, participation rates go up. So do federal reimbursements to schools, which makes CEP more appealing.

At last count — and the numbers change constantly — out of 54 eligible counties, all but six have implemented CEP at some or all schools. The most recent to come aboard was Pocahontas County, where the school board voted to move ahead last month. Over 20 counties provide free meals to all students countywide. And no county that has had CEP since 2012 has chosen to drop the program.

According to the latest data I have, the only eligible counties which have refused to implement the Community Eligibility Program in any schools were Putnam, Monroe, Tucker, Hampshire, Monongalia, and Hancock. (To be fair to Monongalia and Tucker counties, these have gone back and forth in terms of eligibility.)

All in all, Feed to Achieve and CEP have been a good deal for kids, schools and parents. But it’s an even bigger deal than that.

According to the Food Research & Action Center, “Mounting evidence shows that healthy school meals play a key role in supporting the well-being of children, including alleviating food insecurity; improving dietary intake; and mitigating obesity…”

Specifically, the data suggests that free or reduced school meals reduce food insecurity by at least 3.8 percent and also reduces breakfast-skipping. Low-income students who participate have better diet quality than those who don’t.

There are also major potential long-term health benefits. Participation in federally funded child feeding programs is associated with a significantly lower body mass index. According to research published in the Journal of Econometrics, school meal participation reduces obesity rates by at least 17 percent.



The reasons for this are pretty simple. As a school cook in Pocahontas County put it at a school board meeting, “I think we’d see a lot less candy bars, cookies, potato chips and soda pop.”

In a state where it has been estimated that 7 out of 10 health care dollars are spent on chronic diseases often associated with obesity, that’s a huge deal. No pun intended.

The Food Research & Action Center concludes that “Schools that offer breakfast free to all students in the classroom report decreases in discipline, psychological problems, visits to school nurses and tardiness; increases in student attentiveness and attendance; and generally improved learning environments.”

In these troubled times, it’s nice to see West Virginia shine. If we keep up the progress we’ve made in this important area, we can shine even brighter in the future.

- See more at: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/gazette-op-ed-commentaries/20160922/rick-wilson-why-its-a-good-idea-to-feed-kids-gazette#sthash.UrL1YPBJ.dpuf

Hunger games in Congress

The following op-ed of mine appeared in today's Gazette-Mail. If you feel so inclined, please contact your representative and ask that they not mess with feeding kids in school.

We have a tendency in West Virginia to top the lists of bad things and bring up the rear of the lists of good things. One fortunate exception to that pattern is the area of child nutrition, in which we’ve made huge strides in recent years.

Some readers may remember the 2013 Feed to Achieve Act, which passed the Legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support. The bill was “to eventually provide free nutritious meals for all pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade school children in West Virginia.”

We’ve come a long way toward that goal since then. For the last two years, West Virginia has led the nation in school breakfast participation.

Rising to the top of that list was a huge turnaround. As MetroNews reported in February, a few years ago, only about 28 percent of students were fed school breakfasts. Now that number has increased to over 82 percent. This is a big deal since kids who are “hangry” — hungry and angry — can’t learn very well.

Part of the reason for that success was Feed to Achieve’s mandate that schools offer innovate ways of serving breakfast. But a federal policy enacted in 2010 also helped.

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows school boards to provide free meals for all students in schools with a high percentage of children in poverty. The idea is to improve nutrition, remove stigma for getting free or reduced lunches, reduce paperwork, and to improve education and reduce discipline problems.

CEP has so far been adopted by 46 of 55 counties. Of these, 19 provide free meals to all students in the county at this time, with at least one new county to step up next year. As of January 2016, 429 out of 686 schools were participating — a rate of around 62 percent that impacted nearly 146,000 students.

It’s a big deal.

The bad news is that proposed legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives could undo much of that progress. The bill in question is HB 5003, misnamed as the “Improving Child Nutrition and Education Act of 2016.” Its lead sponsor is Indiana Congressman Todd Rokita.

According to the national Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “If this bill becomes law, 7,022 schools now using community eligibility to simplify their meal programs and improve access for low-income students could have to reinstate applications and return to monitoring eligibility in the lunch line within two years. These schools serve nearly 3.4 million students. Another 11,647 schools that qualify for community eligibility but have not yet adopted it could lose eligibility.”

The bill would also increase and complicate school meal application verification requirements in ways likely to cause students to lose access to free or reduced meals.

Advocates for better child health and nutrition have also expressed concerns about the bill’s weakening of nutrition standards and its impact on participants in child care and summer feeding programs as well as the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program.

I’m hoping that our congressional delegation will stand up for West Virginia’s children and oppose these measures. We’ve come too far to turn back now.

Something that works

OK, in the grand scheme of things, improving child nutrition in public schools may not sound like a big deal. But you know what? By more than one measure, it's working. This year, in spite of the whole WV-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket thing, huge strides have been made in feeding kids. And it's something to build on in the future.

More it's not all bad

I'm trying to keep reminding myself of the positive things happening in WV right now--and there really are some. The latest example of good news is the vote by the Cabell County school board to offer free meals to all students starting next year and expanding the program to Huntington High immediately.

The county (my home turf) is already considered a national leader in child nutrition and opted for the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) at the earliest opportunity. CEP allows for free meals to all students in schools where the poverty rate is at or above 40 percent.

The numbers are pretty huge. Cabell has 28 schools with an enrollment over 12,000. Huntington High alone has around 1,600 students.

This means that 20 of WV's 55 counties now offer free meals to all students. The majority of other counties (despite a diminishing number of holdouts) offer CEP to qualifying schools.

A slow theological slog

Swiss theologian Karl Barth, 1886-1968.

Finishing a large, difficult book is a kind of marathon, although generally it is one mercifully broken up over an extended period of time rather than a few hours. Last night I finally finished reading the signature work of Karl Barth, one of the 20th century's premier theologians.

The book in question was The Epistle to the Romans, first published around 1918. It was 537 dense pages of text, many of which went right over my head. I borrowed it from a friend and sometime reader of this blog back around Thanksgiving. It went into my morning pile of books that I try to turn a couple of pages of over coffee most mornings.

Barth is probably best known for his work in organizing Christian opposition to the Nazi movement in Europe,and especially its efforts to Nazify Christianity, by establishing the Confessing Church. Some if its members, such as Martin Niemoller, wound up in concentration camps. Others, like Dietrich Bonheoffer, were executed by the regime.

If I had to sum up Barth's theology, I couldn't, but maybe one could start like this: the main thing you need to know about God is that you ain't. Barth rejected liberal and rationalist theology and instead emphasized that God is absolutely unknowable by humans--except as He (Barth was pre-feminist but would probably be cool with it today) freely chose to reveal himself in the Gospel proclamation.

I think I like Barth because I do believe in the absolute distinction between God and humanity. I even believe in that on the days I doubt God. Nothing seems loopier or more self-evidently false than the assertion that humans are somehow divine. The Quakers may be right that there is "that of God" in every person. But if so, I'd say that "that" is what Bob Dylan called a "broken mirror of innocence," i.e. something that might reflect light but not originate it.

Somedays I'm orthodox in spite of myself.

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES. This story about real estate highlights our growing issues of inequality.

THANKS, GUYS. NOT. Here's a look at the fun loving guys who gave us West Virginia's 2014 chemical spill.

HOW BOUT WE FEED SOME KIDS? Here's my latest op-ed on school meals, the Feed to Achieve Act and Community Eligibility.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

It's working

The last couple years in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, believe it or not, have been pretty successful in terms of progressive public policies. We've expanded Medicaid coverage and early childhood education, raised the minimum wage, and created a Future Fund. One other success was the passage last year of the Feed to Achieve Act, which is aimed at improving child nutrition in West Virginia. From today's Gazette, here's some evidence that it's already starting to work.

This is an issue near and dear to me. My employer, the American Friends Service Committee, first came to WV in 1922 to work on child nutrition--specifically, to help feed the children of unemployed coal miners. It's kind of sad that we're still working on child nutrition over 90 years later--but I'm hopeful we're gonna get it this time!

The (feather) harvest is heavy, but laborers are few

Sometimes people use the word "harvest" as if it was a once a year thing. I suppose that may be true of monocultures, but at Goat Rope Farm, harvests of one type or another go on throughout a good chunk of the year.

Thanks to a cold frame engineered by the Spousal Unit, we've harvested lettuce and spinach for a good chunk of late winter and early spring. Garlic is midsummer. Now we have a scary invasion of summer squash.

But the agricultural product of the moment is....peacock feathers.

Our guy, Woodstock, is shedding them at this time, leaving them all over the vicinity. It is one of my tasks to go on walkabouts to retrieve as many as possible. Their eventual destination is the classroom, where said Spousal Unit gives them out as favors. Most popular, of course, are the ones with eyes. The more drab ones, however, make excellent cat toys. Such is life on the cutting edge of post-modern farming.

JUST ONE LINK, BUT IT'S A GOOD ONE. Here's an exciting article about how WV's new Feed to Achieve is being implemented. The long term goal is to ensure that all WV school children enjoy at least two free meals per day (and, we hope, more), but already progress is being made. This article is about innovative ways of offering school breakfasts that should increase participation.

And let me just say that the WV Office of Child Nutrition, which operates under the WV Department of Education, rocks. They are doing a wonderful job every day of trying to ensure and improve access to good food for all the children of this state and they have a passion for it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Mother's Day and much more

Lots of people celebrated Mother's Day this Sunday. I wonder how many know that the mother of Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, was a West Virginian. A social activist, over time she became disillusioned by the commercialization of the day she helped to create. Read a bit more here.

WHAT'S THE PLAN? In this op-ed by a friend of mine, the writer asks Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito, an opponent of the Affordable Care Act, exactly what she proposes as an alternative.

AND WHAT'S AFFORDABLE? In this one, yours truly responds to the same theme.

GASSED UP. Here's one by another friend of mine on how WV can do better in regulating and otherwise managing the Marcellus Shale gas play.

FEED TO ACHIEVE. Here's more on new WV legislation to combat child malnutrition and improve health and school performance.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Mr. Mojo risin'

It seems to me that some days are better than others for former WV Governor and now Senator Joe Manchin, but the last several have been some of his best. I really appreciate his efforts to bring a little bit of sanity to the whole gun debate. He did us proud this time.

MEDICAID EXPANSION. Montana might be next, although it would involve private companies (corporate welfare). I guess that's better than nothing though.

FEED TO ACHIEVE. Here's an op-ed by a friend of mine in defense of new legislation in WV that aims to improve child nutrition.

PERSONAL STORY. I knew for sure that the Spousal Unit was an outstanding woman when she pointed out to me that the title of this post (from the Doors' song LA Woman) is an anagram for Jim Morrison.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED