Federal meal programs supported youths’ access to food during COVID school closures

An obvious and potentially catastrophic issue arose when schools were closed during the pandemic's first year: how would millions of kids from low-income families acquire the school meals that many of them relied on?

In response, the US Congress gave the Department of Agriculture permission to launch two significant programmes. It also provided funds for the state-run Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) programme, which provided parents with debit cards so they could shop for goods at grocery stores, as well as the "grab and go school meals" initiative, which enabled schools deliver prepared meals for off-site consumption.

The programmes reached more than 30 million children and either directly supplied meals or, through the P-EBT programme, paid for roughly 1.5 billion meals a month in 2020, according to a recent analysis led by the Harvard and University of Washington schools of public health.

In a recent study released on August 31 in JAMA Network Open, the researchers discovered:

The P-EBT programme provided access to 1.1 billion meals per month to 26.9 million of the 30 million children whose families qualified due of low income at a cost of $6.46 per meal.
The grab-and-go programme provided 429 million meals each month to 8 million children who were not P-EBT eligible for $8.07 per meal.