Poor Kids Must Eat in Summertime Too : County Should Subsidize Meals When School’s Out

It is now September, and soon schools on traditional schedules will reopen after summer vacation. That’s good news for many thousands of children in Orange County who, during school sessions, are fed lunch through a federal assistance program but are not when school is out.

Despite the poverty of many of its neighborhoods, Orange County is the only urban county in the state in which there is no federal lunch program in operation for indigent children while they are out of school. That shouldn’t be so.

In all, 52,000 children in Orange County receive free lunches or lunch subsidies during school sessions through a program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When school is out, the USDA makes available similar programs to agencies that service areas in which schools subsidize meals for 50% or more of their students. Such lunches also are available in other counties where schools are year-round, not just in summer months but also in the so-called “off-track” weeks between sessions.

But no agency yet has taken advantage of the program in Orange County. As a result, both the USDA and California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), an anti-poverty group, are targeting Orange County, hoping to bring a subsidized-meals program on line in the next year. The end of this summer is a good time to be planning for next.

While Orange County’s image is one of affluence, there are portions of Santa Ana, Garden Grove and several other cities with an underclass of impoverished families. The children from these families many times eat their only good meal of the day at school. When they are on school breaks, however, nothing magical happens to replace that meal. Food banks in these areas report that it is not unusual to have these hungry children show up at their agencies looking for something to eat. It is heartbreaking, they say, to turn them away.

Meanwhile, the county’s ability to respond to the needs of poor families seems to diminish with each budgetary year. This is why the USDA program is especially needed now.

Why then do no such programs exist in Orange County? The reasons are many. While it seems hard to believe, officials at school districts in poverty areas said they haven’t noticed much of a demand. Meanwhile, nonprofit agencies--eligible to provide meals programs for the first time in nearly a decade--said they are discouraged by the applications and daunting requirements.

No such agencies in Orange County, and only six in the state, completed applications in time to begin programs this year. A few, including the Salvation Army of Anaheim, are determined to be ready by 1991. Meanwhile, CRLA is counseling agencies on how to apply and is working with the USDA to simplify rules. The Orange County Hunger Coalition has also been organizing for months to help agencies gear up programs.

Other urban areas in California long ago worked through the initial difficulties of establishing meal-subsidy programs during school breaks. In Los Angeles, for example, the school district’s 18-year-old lunch program serves an average of 34,000 meals a day. And Riverside’s Parks and Recreation Department for 17 years has operated a lunch program that on a typical summer day serves 1,000 children.

Labor Day will mark the traditional end of summer. But Orange County needs a major commitment to provide children’s lunch programs in the future. Let’s make sure that such programs are in operation by next summer.