Summer Food Service & the Houston Food Bank
Thursday, July 10, 2014

How the HFB works to keep children fed during the summer

Summer can be a difficult time for families.  Children are out of school, but most parents continue to work full-time jobs in order to make ends meet, and may have to choose between paying for rent and paying for food. And children who depend on the National School Lunch Program for free or reduced lunches during the year may be food insecure during the summer months.  

Since1968, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-funded Summer Food Service Program has provided free, nutritious meals and snacks to help children in low-income areas obtain the food they need to learn, play, and grow throughout the summer when they are out of school.  The program is designed to provide two nutritious meals per day; either breakfast and lunch or lunch and a substantial afternoon snack.  But like all government-funded programs, the size and growth of the program depends on continued funding and support, which has fluctuated over the years.

The critical importance of free or reduced lunch and, increasingly, breakfast programs is well understood: hunger is a powerful deterrent to academic success and healthy growth and development.   So the question is: where and what are children who participated in the free/reduced NSLP (and breakfast programs, where available) eating during the summer months out of school?

In Texas, the answer is not clear.  In 2013, only 8% of children receiving free or reduced school lunches participated in the summer food program.  That means that about one of every 12 students that qualified for summer food assistance received it. This puts Texas behind the national average of one in every seven students receiving free or reduced lunch in the NSLP participating in SFSP.

While it is not clear where, how, or if these children are finding nutritional support during the summer, it is clear that the Summer Food Service Program has several challenges that need to be met in order to provide more nutritious meals to the kids that need them. And the Houston Food Bank is working to meet these challenges:

• The Houston Food Bank is directly involved with the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP): its Keegan Kitchen prepares more than 2,600 hot meals and snacks each day for meal sites in our SFSP. This is nearly double the amount of meals prepared last summer.
• Children who don’t attend summer school are sometimes apartment-bound due to safety and transportation concerns. And while Houston, unlike other areas, has many SFSP meal-site sponsors, communication among them has been minimal.  Earlier this summer, the Food Bank hosted a meeting for regional and local leaders from the USDA, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), other hunger-relief organizations, and local SFSP meal-site sponsors from the public, private and non-profit sectors to discuss SFSP. This was a landmark opportunity to increase communication among SFSP providers, and highlighted a potential role for apartment complex management companies across the greater Houston area to increase participation in future years.
• Summer school-based programs are a great source of SFSP sites, but offer their own set of challenges. They only operate when summer school is in session, so weekends and the time between sessions and the regular school year cause gaps that can be up to three weeks long. The Houston Food Bank is interested in researching new opportunities to provide for children in these situations. One such idea is a program that would provide Electronic Benefit Cards (EBTs) similar to the cards distributed through SNAP to families already identified through the NSLP during the regular school year. This idea is in the very early stages, however, and would likely take several years to implement.         

To learn more about the Summer Food Service Program, including information on how to find summer meal sites, how your organization can become an SFSP site or sponsor, and other information, visit Summerfood.org.