The Weekly Food Research and Action Center News Digest highlights what's new on hunger, nutrition and poverty issues at FRAC, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, around the network of national, state and local anti-poverty and anti-hunger organizations, and in the media. The Digest will alert you to trends, reports, news items and resources and, when available, link you directly to them.

1. Child Nutrition Act Must be Reauthorized Soon to Meet Obama’s Child Hunger Goal
(OregonLive.com, June 13, 2010; News Tribune, June 1, 2010)

“Two key moves” by Congress last week led the Child Nutrition Act closer to reauthorization, but the Act must be reauthorized soon if we are to meet President Obama’s goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015, notes this commentary. In the Senate, Ron Wyden (D-OR), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and five other senators sent a letter to their colleagues stating “While the current bill [the Senate Agriculture Committee’s CNR bill] represents a good start, we want to work with you to find more funds in order to increase the lunch reimbursement rate…and – at a minimum – match the President’s recommendation of $10 billion for child nutrition.” The letter listed several goals for reauthorization, including expanding access to afterschool, summer and child care food programs by lowering the area eligibility from 50 percent to 40 percent. The House Education and Labor Committee last week released its bill, which contains the 50 to 40 percent shift (editor’s note: only for rural), and increases spending by $7 to $8 billion. “We think it’s a significant step forward,” said Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center. Weill also noted that the bill includes competitive grants that would encourage schools to offer universal breakfast, which has been shown to increase breakfast participation. “Portland did a good job with in-class breakfast,” said Weill, “but it’s fallen backward in the last couple of years.” The commentary concludes by stating “[I]t should be a priority to get child [nutrition] reauthorization done, and done right.”

An editorial in the Tacoma, Wash.-based News Tribune notes that many Pierce County sites that could serve summer meals find the red tape to do so overwhelming. “Streamlining the application process for obtaining funding…is one goal for anti-hunger advocates as they work toward congressional reauthorization…of the federal Child Nutrition Act in the coming weeks. It’s a goal the state’s delegation should support.” During the school year, 43 percent (54,000) of Pierce County’s children qualify for free or reduced-price school meals. The county has 229 schools, but only 97 of them have some kind of meal program in the summer. According to the Emergency Food Network (EFN), these programs are only reaching an estimated eight percent of the children needing summer meals. “Anti-hunger organizations like EFN see a real need for a $1 billion annual increase in funding for childhood nutrition programs from the current level of $22 billion a year. That would allow higher-quality food to be bought and make it possible to serve more children on weekends and during the summer.”

2. Strong CNR Would Benefit Thousands of Long Island Children
(Newsday, June 16, 2010)

Only 24 percent of the 100,000 Long Island students receiving free or reduced-price lunch also receive subsidized breakfast, and only eight percent receive free summer meals. The financial burden is too much for public school systems in the area to participate in the summer meals program. Yet there is still a need in the summer, especially since 65,000 Long Island households receive emergency food each week, with 80 percent of those households that have children considered “food insecure.” A strong Child Nutrition Act would make it possible for more children to receive the nutrition critical to learning, notes this op-ed by Gwen O’Shea, president and chief executive of the Health and Welfare Council of Long Island. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have sponsored legislation that would expand the reach of school and summer meal programs, “including reducing the minimum percentage of eligible students for maximum reimbursement from 50 percent of the student body to 40 percent." This legislation also would provide free breakfast to all students in qualifying schools, which not only assures all students benefit from the meal but removes the stigma associated with subsidized school meals. Increased Child Nutrition Act legislation also will enable schools to improve meal nutrition value and quality. “In a region as prosperous as Long Island, there’s no reason for 76,000 kids to start their school day hungry, or for 92,000 children who are eligible for and need nutritious meals during July and August to go without them,” O’Shea concludes. Strengthening the Child Nutrition Act is key to eliminating the hunger felt by the area’s children. (Article available by subscription only.)

3. Louisiana Coast Fishing Families Apply for SNAP/Food Stamps in Wake of BP Spill
(The Miami Herald, June 13, 2010)

“This is a first,” said Bernard Johnson, a third generation Louisiana coast fisherman whose family applied for SNAP/Food Stamps as the Gulf of Mexico oil spill destroyed coastal wildlife. “I have never asked the government or anybody else for help in my life. And it was hard for me to do, but we just don’t know how this thing is going to turn out.” The oil spill has affected almost 48,000 households that rely on the seafood industry and related businesses. At 14 mobile sites set up after the spill, 1,591 residents have applied for emergency SNAP/Food Stamps. “You are talking about fishermen who have just spent money getting their boats in order for the season, then all of a sudden their livelihoods are taken away,” said Natalie Jayroe, president and CEO of the Second Harvest Food Bank in New Orleans. Emergency food services are reporting significant jumps in assistance requests, and communities have pulled together to help their residents as BP’s monthly claim checks have been unevenly distributed, cover only a fraction of a fisherman’s salary and expenses, and the company has limited its hiring of local workers to clean up the oil. The state social services department is promoting its online SNAP/Food Stamp application process to sign up many eligible residents who are too embarrassed to walk into a state assistance office. “With so many people here whose lives hinge on seafood, there’s a huge need for food since the oil spill,” said Pastor Bryan Strickland of Cornerstone Church of God in Violet, La. “A lot of people live check to check and you have some who were still recovering from the recession and Hurricane Katrina.” Bernard Johnson has landed some work with BP, but the $8,000 he’s made so far pales next to the $60,000 he could get from a good June shrimp harvest. “I am still better off than a lot of people,” he said. “But I went ahead and got the food stamps because, who knows?”

4. San Diego SNAP/Food Stamp Call Center Swamped
(Voice of San Diego, June 14, 2010)

A San Diego program titled “Access,” which was launched last year, was meant to streamline the application process for SNAP/Food Stamps and other assistance programs. The call center, however, has been overwhelmed with twice the number of calls as the county expected. USDA reviewers called the Access number and “failed on numerous occasions or had extreme difficulty reaching a live person…Because of the ACCESS system’s limitations, there is, at this time, no way of knowing the number or percentage of calls that are automatically being dropped by the system when all lines are in use.” Responding to USDA’s criticism that the call center “was not adequately staffed and did not have enough lines,” the program added a “self-service” option in April, increased staff and equipment, and provided a consultant. Average wait times were reduced to four minutes in the first month. Callers are still waiting an average of 21 minutes and six seconds, which was more than twice the average time USDA found that a caller would wait until they hung up.

5. Lawsuit Alleges Texas SNAP/Food Stamp Applicants Stuck in Bureaucracy
(The Monitor, June 12, 2010)

Court filings by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid allege that although the state has been working to reduce the record backlog of SNAP/Food Stamp applicants, many individuals are in a “Kafkaesque bureaucracy” and have been denied the benefit. The state has told these applicants that they have failed to produce the required documents, although the applicants have done so, or they have missed appointments, which they in fact did not miss. It’s estimated that 3 million Texans don’t participate in the program yet are eligible. “The way (the state) has been catching up on their backlog is by cutting a lot of corners and causing a lot of pain for people,” said David Hall, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid’s executive director. “We end up with thousands of people with a bona fide claim to food stamps, but procedural issues are standing in the way.” The federal government had threatened to pull the state’s SNAP/Food Stamp funding because less than 58 percent of new applicants had their applications approved within the mandated 30 day limit. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission hired 850 workers to tackle the application backlog; many of the plaintiffs in an earlier lawsuit have since received their benefits. Still, there are problems. India Bloom applied in September 2009, and after a lengthy battle and long wait periods, received two letters last month from the Commission. One letter told her she had been approved. The other denied her benefits because she hadn’t provided enough information. Advocates say the Commission could make things easier for applicants by removing the asset test, one way of helping eliminate the confusing paperwork required to sign up for the program.

6. Arizona SNAP/Food Stamp Program Hits Record 1 Million Participants
(Public News Service, June 16, 2010)

The number of Arizona residents on SNAP/Food Stamps has grown to over 1 million, a record number. “Every month since 2007, our enrollment numbers have increased over the previous month,” said Katie Kahle, program manager for the Arizona Community Action Association. “We had about 600,000 people enrolled [in 2007], and now we have over a million.” Job losses and the housing crisis have forced many to apply for the assistance who have never sought help like this before. SNAP/Food Stamps “enable households to purchase nutritious foods, so that they can continue on with their daily lives [and] be contributing members of society – without having to worry about where their next meal’s going to come from,” said Kahle. The benefit provides an average of $1.43 per person per meal. Interested families and individuals seeking help can be prescreened for SNAP/Food Stamps and more than 30 other social service programs at www.arizonaselfhelp.org.

7. Long-Term Unemployed Face End of Benefits, Turn to SNAP/Food Stamps
(Gazette Extra, June 13, 2010)

Thousands of Janesville, Wisc. residents lost their jobs when factories in the area producing goods for GM plants cut back on workers after GM shut down. Many are struggling to find work and hundreds face the end of their 99 weeks of unemployment compensation. “Former breadwinners” are now on SNAP/Food Stamps. Ginny Oldenburg receives some support from SNAP/Food Stamps, and gives her family grilled-cheese sandwiches and macaroni and cheese to keep the grocery bill down. She said she won’t go to a food pantry because there are others who are in worse shape that need the emergency food help. “There are people on the street,” she said. “I’m not on the street.” Resa Haile searches for jobs online and walks into businesses “cold” to apply. “I recently applied at one place and heard that a thousand people had applied,” she said. Haile started receiving SNAP/Food Stamps when she had no money for food, and said she was “so grateful” for the assistance. She visited a local food pantry and was “surprised at how many others were there.”
Additional articles in series:
Hard work turns into second careers
Rock County isn’t alone in battling unemployment woes

8. Summer Meal Programs Not Meeting Need
(AOL News, June 16, 2010; La Vida Locavore, June 18, 2010; FRAC, June 18, 2010)

The 16 million children across the country who face a summer of hunger rely on a “patchwork” of “summer food programs…which feed fewer than one in five of the total number of kids poor enough to qualify.” Child food insecurity peaks over the summer, according to federal studies. In the fall, these children will be less ready to learn, and less healthy, than other students. While 3.3 million children received summer meals last year, twelve states saw fewer than one in ten eligible children participate, according to an AOL news analysis. Only 5.3 percent of eligible children in Oklahoma received summer meals; “We’d like to grow, said Paula Clayton of the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma. “It’s just finding the staff, getting the trucks out there.” New Mexico, New York and Washington, D.C. had the highest summer meal participation, as one-third of children eligible for free or reduced-price lunch also got free summer meals. The number of students receiving federally-subsidized school meals this year increased to a record 20.5 million, up from 19.4 million in 2009. “The demand during the [past] school year has increased at a much faster rate than the summer food program can pick up,” said Crystal FitzSimons of the Food Research and Action Center. Recession-based budget cuts could lower the number of sites serving summer meals this year, FitzSimons warns. Summer school sessions are being cut back by school districts facing budget shortfalls – and with them, the meals served to students taking summer classes. Parks, recreation centers, churches and other community groups try to pick up the slack, but they face cutbacks also. Rural areas have their own food and participant transportation issues. Sites also have to follow USDA’s regulations to be reimbursed for summer meals – which require that children eat meals meeting nutritional standards on-site while supervised by trained monitors. Also, sites must be located in areas where at least half of the children are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals. Anti-hunger policy groups would like see that number reduced to 40 percent in the upcoming Child Nutrition Reauthorization. The AOL article prompted commentary by Rush Limbaugh that was critical of summer meal programs. La Vida Locavore responded to Limbaugh, and included FRAC’s statement on summer meals in response to the commentary.

9. Efforts Underway to Enroll Uninsured Children in Medicaid and SCHIP
(USA Today, June 15, 2010)

A group of young adults in St. Louis, Mo., some of them homeless and living at Covenant House or enrolled in school there, are earning money by knocking on doors in the city’s low-income neighborhoods and helping parents sign their children up for Medicaid or SCHIP. They are part of a nationwide drive to sign up the five million uninsured children in this country who are eligible for Medicaid and SCHIP but have not enrolled. The Obama administration has set a goal of making sure all eligible children are signed on by 2015. The St. Louis “door knockers” are paid by federal grant money awarded to 35 mostly grassroots-involved black churches that make up the coalition known as Metropolitan Organizations Strengthening and Empowering Society (MOSES). The federal government provided $40 million in enrollment initiative grants across the country, with $80 million yet to be handed out. The new healthcare law, which goes into effect in 2014, requires that most people have insurance and offers coverage options. Parents of eligible children who aren’t enrolled in Medicaid and SCHIP often don’t know their children are eligible, or don’t know how to sign enroll their children. Some states have confusing and intricate application processes. According to Cindy Mann, the top Department of Health and Human Services Medicaid official, the work that is being done by groups like the St. Louis young adults will help determine the best ways of enrolling children. Louisiana, which has one of the most aggressive efforts to insure children, signed up 10,000 uninsured by searching SNAP/Food Stamp lists – which required no work from parents. The state reduced the percentage of uninsured children from 11 percent in 2003 to five percent in 2009; nearly 85,000 children in the state who were previously without health insurance are now signed on to Medicaid and SCHIP. The St. Louis workers have signed on more than 150 since March.