SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) – Almost any educator will tell you that one of the biggest threats to a child’s learning and behavior in school is hunger.
As the Sioux Falls School District’s child nutrition coordinator, Gay Anderson is one of them. Her last 21 years in education have been spent addressing this topic.
“Well-fed kids are better educated,” Anderson said. “Kids do a lot better when their stomach’s not grumbling on them.”
Almost half of K-12 students are already receiving free or reduced lunches from the federal government.
But soon, some kids in the district who don’t qualify for that program — or, whose parents haven’t applied for them to qualify — will be denied at least some food if their parents continue to not pay their food debts with the district.
Anderson leads the SFSD’s department that will have to enforce the payments and penalties.
“It’s gut-wrenching having to deal with this,” said Anderson told Dakota News Now on Monday. “My job is feeding kids. My team feeds kids daily. Nobody wants to do this. There is no win in this.”
Every K-12 student that does not receive free or reduced meals has a “food account” with the district. Over the weekend, the district notified parents that starting Friday, all negative food accounts will be set back to zero thanks to generous donors. This is not the first time private citizens have come to the rescue.
But starting next Monday, a child’s consequence for unpaid debts will be less food. In extreme cases, no food.
When a non-qualifying student’s account has any amount of negative balance, breakfast will be denied. If an account reaches a balance of -$20, the student will be offered a “Smart Snack” and a milk rather than a hot lunch.
If an account reaches $75 below zero, no food can be served to the student.
“Nobody wants to do this, period,” Anderson said. “We don’t want to have to tell a child, if we get to that point of minus-75 dollars that we’re unable to feed them.”
She said she is only doing what she is told to do — collect the money for the United States Department of Agriculture, which provides food for the program. Anderson said the district has run out of ways to skirt the situation of making parents pay. Some donors, she said, want to be assured they aren’t “taken advantage of.”
Last year, the SFSD owed the USDA about $220,000 in unpaid food debt from school meals. It is trending toward $400,000 by the end of this school year, and this is despite those ongoing private donations.
“How many businesses can open their doors every day and know that they’re going to lose $3,000 a day? That’s where we’re at. We’re averaging $3,000 a day in unpaid meals,” Anderson said. “Right now, the rubber hits the road. We can’t continue this. It’s not sustainable.”
In 2012, the district’s debt for this program was $7,000. So how did that amount multiply by a staggering 57 times in the last 12 years?
“We all like to blame everything on Covid,” Anderson said. “That was part of it. There were two years that families didn’t have to pay for anything. So these families didn’t even have to complete applications. They may have not had to fill out an application before that because maybe they didn’t have a child in school yet. So, (some were) not even realizing that step.”
Anderson said this is not a result of lack of communication by her staff. The Children’s Nutrition Center takes extensive measures to make sure parents and guardians — especially those with a language barrier or those who may not have access to computers — are aware of the application process for free and reduced meals. Constant notices are sent via both email and letters in the mail.
The application takes five minutes to fill out and can be done online or through the mail.
To qualify for free and reduced lunch, a family must be at 185% of the poverty level as determined by the federal government. But there is additional assistance that families can get through the district up to 230%, Anderson confirmed.
“If they don’t qualify, if we have the funds, we can look at some of different poverty levels where, as donations come in, we can maybe treat this one group,” Anderson said. “We could cover their meal costs. Or, we’ve got two other groups that we’re looking at where we can have some matching funds. Our work is not without a lot of effort and compassion.”
For 18 years, Anderson held this same position with the Brandon Valley School District before coming to SFSD in 2020. For eight years, she was on the National School Nutrition Board — the latter two as president. In that role during the pandemic, she wrote a letter to (then) Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Purdue, pleading to provide free lunches to all students.
It was granted up until the summer before the 2021-22 school year, when Covid case and death numbers started to plummet.
“Once Covid passed and now we have to go back to families paying for meals, (families) were out of practice, and they also knew that we have helped out and assisted where we could,” Anderson siad. “We have not been following policy the way we should because we have had great donors.”
Within 24 hours of the district sending this new policy notice to parents and guardians, 148 new applications had already flowed into the office by Noon on Monday.
Child hunger and the debt from negative accounts is the No. 1 conundrum Anderson’s staff has faced over her three years in the role.
She wishes no parents had to pay for their kids’ food, not just those struggling to make ends meet. She’d rather her staff not be burdened with the task of being debt collectors.
There’s a much better, easier way to pay for kids to eat at school, she said.
“The best possible method is free meals for all students,” Anderson said. ”As a district, we can continue to advocate free meals for all students like they were two years ago, when that was nationwide.”
A couple state lawmakers agree that free meals for kids at school should be a moral obligation of the government.
”We require kids to be there all day long,” State Sen. Reynold Nesiba (D-Sioux Falls) told Dakota News Now. “We don’t make them pay for the bus ride. We don’t make them pay for a Chromebook. We don’t make them pay for the books. Why do we make them pay for the school lunch that they’re required to be on campus to consume?”
Nesiba represents students in the Sioux Falls School District.
“It’s wrong to punish kids with hunger for something their parents failed to do, or that their state-elected officials have failed to do,” Nesiba said.
Last year, State Representative Kadyn Wittman of Sioux Falls introduced legislation that will allow all kids in the state to have a free lunch and breakfast..
HB 1221 failed 14-1 in the House Education committee. Wittman will propose the same bill this upcoming session.
The price tag would be just shy of $40 million.
“This would be about one tenth of one percent of the sales tax,” said Nesiba. “We cut the sales tax by 0.3 percent (this past legislative session), and that was a little over $100 million, so ($40 million) is about 0.1 percent of the overall sales tax.”
In other words —
“We can afford as a state to do this,” Nesiba said. “It’s a matter of, ‘Is this our priority? Is this consistent with our values?’ I think it is. I think South Dakota cares about our kids.”
Nine states currently provide free lunch to all students, including Minnesota. Nesiba said that South Dakota kids don’t deserve anything less than their neighbors.
He called on Gov. Kristi Noem to stand behind Wittman’s proposal.
“I think that Governor Kristi Noem cares about kids,” Nesiba said. “She cares about South Dakota families. I think it would be consistent for her to come out and say, ‘We’re going to do this. We want to take care of all families in South Dakota. This is a more efficient way of making sure that kids get the nutrition they need.’ I hope she joins us in leading the charge and finding the revenues to do this.
“I hope she puts it in her own budget address, which is coming up next week.”
Dakota News Now reached out to a member of Noem’s communications team and asked if she would be in favor of the proposed bill. No response had been received by the time this article was published.
Earlier on Monday on his Twitter (X) account, Nesiba retweeted this opinion from Ryne Andal, a software developer from Sioux Falls who referenced Noem’s “Freedom Works Here” advertising campaign, which was funded by $6.5 million in state money:
“We’ll willingly spend millions on advertisement campaigns to paint @GovKristiNoem in a good light while she attempts to curry national political favor, but children will go hungry while obligated to attend @SFSchools if they accrue enough lunch debt.”
Noem’s aid addressed that tweet to DNN with, in part, this response: “The Department of Education has multiple food programs available to those who need them.” The aid then encouraged DNN to reach out to that agency.
When asked about the $6.5 million spent on “Freedom Works Here” in comparison to a proposed $40 million in state money to fund school lunches, Nesiba clarified that funding for those two programs is appropriated differently. Most of the funds for “Freedom Works Here” come out of the governor’s discretionary future fund that focuses on economic development.
“But, we shouldn’t forget that education is economic development,” Nesiba said. “And, it’s really important that our kids get the nutrition they need so they can do their studies and we can focus on making sure kids are fed and kids are learning rather than trying to decide who is deserving and who isn’t deserving, and who needs to pay a bill.”
Nesiba finds the fact that almost half of K-12 students in Sioux Falls are already receiving free and reduced lunches is indictive of a bigger picture.
“Hunger is a real issue in this community,” Nesiba said. “There’s good work being done by people at The Banquet, by Feeding South Dakota, but it’s not meeting that need entirely. There’s stills tens of thousands of folks that benefit from the food stamp (SNAP) program every month. Taking that sales tax off of food would help an awful lot of people who don’t qualify for those kinds of benefits, who don’t go and get free food anywhere else, but would be able to get at least that state portion, that 4.2 percent back, off of their taxes.”
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