This summer parents were supposed to have a bit more financial breathing room while their children were out of school. The government rolled out , the first new federal food assistance program in decades, for its inaugural year, providing qualifying families $120 per school-aged child to help them afford groceries during the summer while going without school meals to help feed their kids. 

Nearly 21 million children are eligible for the program, but there are early warning signs that many families were unable to take advantage of the benefits. 

A prominent challenge is that the enrollment process was opaque and complicated enough that hundreds of thousands of families may miss out altogether, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars unclaimed and sent back to the government, according to policy consultant David Rubel, who has done extensive research on the Summer EBT program as well as its predecessor, the , which gave parents money to cover meals while children were learning remotely.

Erika Marquez’s family was one of many that were unable to access the funding. Marquez has four children — three of them attend school programs and one, her infant, is at home. Her husband, who she is separated from, told her that he received a letter saying that Summer EBT benefits were coming, but said he got no further instructions about how to actually claim the funds. “He didn’t know who to contact, how to contact them, or anything for that matter,” she said. 

Summers are always harder for her family to make ends meet — when her three school-age kids are home, they miss two daily meals they would have gotten for free at school. Marquez was hopeful that the Summer EBT money coming in would help cover that gap this year, but when her family couldn’t access the funds, they suffered. Marquez works full time and says that to ensure that her children have what they need, she has to follow a strict budget to cover all of their expenses, and this was a particularly difficult summer. Living in Las Vegas, Nevada, which experienced the on record, her electricity bill went through the roof after cranking the air conditioning. Normally it costs her about $100 to $150 for the season; this summer she says it was about $400. 

Without help from the new food assistance program, Marquez says she had to ignore those utility bills and prioritize groceries so that her children had enough to eat. “It’s just hard when you hear your child say, ‘Mom, my stomach is rumbling,’” she shared. “It’s more important to be able to make sure that my children are fed.” She had to skip paying for electricity for two months, landing her on a payment plan, which has added fees on top of the bill itself. Had she received Summer EBT for her three children, that would have come to $360 — almost the same cost as her electricity bill, she noted. 

Many other parents have found themselves in a similar situation to Marquez this season. In California, according to the state’s response to a FOIA request made by Rubel, 281,690 Summer EBT cards were returned due to a wrong address and went unused between June 1 and Aug. 31. In a state where 1 in 5 residents is food insecure, this is troubling, especially given that during the pandemic, California $1 billion earmarked for P-EBT.

Propel, a financial technology company that helps low-income Americans with banking and public benefits, administered a of low-income families in August, which revealed anecdotal evidence that backs Rubel’s finding that some eligible families had trouble getting the money. The survey surfaced scattered reports of barriers to access. “No, haven’t received yet,” one respondent from Missouri wrote, adding, “It would help me not having to skip meals to feed my kids.” Another from Michigan wrote, “No, it would make a big difference. We haven’t received them yet, or the card.” 

Most of the families that received Summer EBT dollars got their cards automatically through a process known as streamlined certification. States enrolled them without them having to take any action if they were on certain public benefit programs, including free and reduced price school lunch, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. In some states, if a family already had an EBT card for SNAP benefits, for example, the money was automatically loaded onto it; other states decided to send out separate cards.

But a number of eligible families didn’t automatically receive the benefits. For example, families that don’t participate in other programs, but whose children do qualify for free and reduced price meals at school, are eligible for Summer EBT, but they must enroll, which has proven a challenge. In part, that’s because in 2020, Congress made school meals universally free so families did not need to enroll, but that expired last fall, and some parents are out of practice with signing up. In the 41 states without universal school meals, are failing to sign up for free and reduced price meals, let alone Summer EBT. Meanwhile, have passed universal school meals, requiring no paperwork during the school year, so parents had to know to sign up for Summer EBT separately. 

Kelsey Boone, senior child nutrition policy analyst at the Food Research & Action Center, an anti-hunger nonprofit, said that, anecdotally, her organization has heard that while the streamlined application has had a lot of success getting benefits to families, states are seeing “lower than expected application return rates” for everyone else. Kansas, for example, had received applications for Summer EBT by mid-September even though the Kansas Department for Children and Families estimates there are more than 100,000 families that are eligible for the program but have to enroll.

One problem is that some states haven’t created statewide applications specifically for Summer EBT, making it challenging for parents to figure out where and how to apply, and some have buried the applications deep in their websites. Another is that outreach to let parents know what they have to do “has not been as robust as it could be,” Boone said. She added that states don’t always have up-to-date addresses for households, particularly for low-income families who tend to move a lot, so any mail or even the EBT cards themselves may not reach parents. In at least some states, she noted, school districts weren’t even aware they had to tell parents to sign up. 

The same problems plagued the P-EBT program. When summer P-EBT cards were distributed in 2022 and 2023, about $1 billion in benefits went unclaimed by eligible families, according to , and about 4.5 million cards were either expunged or at risk of being expunged. Instead of conducting extensive outreach to make sure parents knew about the benefits and how to claim them, Rubel was told that many state departments of education put the information on their websites and left it to parents to find it. 

The problem with Summer EBT promises to be even more acute. Families had 274 days to realize they were missing out on P-EBT funds and sign up for the benefits, and if they spent at least a dollar the clock would reset, giving them another 274 days. The Summer EBT program gives families just 122 days from the date the money is loaded onto a card to spend it all before it’s forfeited and sent back to the federal government. “This is a very short window,” Rubel said. Nebraska expungement letters in early September. Rubel estimates most of the money will be gone by the end of November.

The good news is that states have been allowed to push application deadlines back so more families can apply and receive their money before it gets forfeited. In an email response to a question about the timeline, a USDA spokesperson said that the agency provided “additional flexibility” to allow all states that participated in the program this year to extend their application deadlines to ensure “sufficient time for applications to be submitted and processed.” The spokesperson said the agency will work with each state individually to determine the “appropriate” amount of time a state can extend a deadline.

Some states have already taken the agency up on the offer. Kansas and both announced they would push their deadlines to apply back.

But Rubel insists that school districts must do outreach to ensure eligible families get the money they’re owed before it’s too late. “They have the capacity, they have the infrastructure,” he said, adding that districts have up-to-date contact information for families. “They need to be prodded a little bit to help their families.”

It’s all the more urgent because the families that did receive Summer EBT dollars saw a huge benefit. In Propel’s August 2024 survey, fewer families reported that they had to eat less, skip meals or were unable to buy the food they wanted as compared to August 2023. Fewer lacked household essentials, owed money on utility bills, or had their utilities shut off; fewer were evicted or lived in unstable housing. Summer EBT “was life saving,” one respondent said. “I didn’t know where my next meal was coming [from].” Another said, “It helped tremendously with groceries for me and my daughter right when we really needed it.”

“This money really can mean the difference between having food on the table and not having food on the table for a family during the summer,” Boone said.

There is a chance to fix this problem before next summer starts. First, advocates hope more states will decide to join the Summer EBT program, ensuring more families can participate. In 2024, 13 states opted out, but , for example, has already said it will join in 2025. The window to opt in for next summer is currently open and will remain so through next August. For the states that participated this year, there are lessons to be learned about expanding accessibility. “There’s a lot of discussion about that right now,” Boone said. Some of that is about how states can improve their outreach, including putting more resources into it, trying to reach families in a multitude of ways and offering better customer service. 

“So many of our problems are so hard to fix,” Rubel said. “This is a really easy one to fix.”

The Iowa Departments of Education and Health and Human Services notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture that Iowa will not participate in a program that provides additional food assistance for children during the summer, the state announced Friday.

The two Iowa departments, alongside Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, released a statement that they plan on “enhancing and expanding already existing childhood nutrition programs” instead of participating in the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children program in 2024.

The program, also known as Summer EBT, provides families with children who are eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school with an EBT card allowing them to purchase $40 of food per child each month when school is not in session.

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In the release, the Iowa officials criticized the Summer EBT program for not having a “strong nutrition focus,” and said the program would cost Iowa $2.2 million, as states are required to cover part of the program’s administrative costs.

Reynolds linked the Summer EBT program to the federal Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) program, a temporary measure meant to provide more assistance for families with children whose access to food was affected by the pandemic.

“Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families. An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,” Reynolds said in a statement. “HHS and the Department of Education have well-established programs in place that leverage partnerships with community-based providers and schools who understand the needs of the families they serve.”

Luke Elzinga, policy and advocacy manager with the Des Moines Area Religious Council and board member of the Iowa Hunger Coalition, said the state had mischaracterized the program. Summer EBT is a new permanent, federal childhood nutrition program, separate from P-EBT. He said the state’s decision was “disappointing,” especially as food pantries and nonprofits see a rising need for food assistance in Iowa.

“We are seeing at food pantries and food banks across the state record-breaking numbers,” Elzinga said. “And during the pandemic, those numbers were down because people had additional SNAP benefits.”

State officials pointed to existing programs, including the Summer Food Service Program and Seamless Summer Option program, that provide food assistance to children and families during the summer in Iowa. These programs, funded by the USDA and administered by the state Department of Education, provide more than 500 meal sites in low-income areas throughout the state. The sites are run by local sponsors and provide spaces for children to get food during the summer.

According to the news release, more than 1.6 million meals and snacks were provided to Iowans age 19 and younger last summer. Iowa Department of Education Director McKenzie Snow said in the release that the department is “looking forward to expanding” partnerships with community groups that help support child nutrition when school is out of session.

Reynolds and Iowa HHS Director Kelly Garcia also criticized the Summer EBT program for not providing a focus on childhood nutrition. According to data from , Iowa has the 10th highest rate of obesity among high school students at 17%, in addition to having a 15.7% obesity rate for children age 10 to 17.

“No child should go hungry, least of all in Iowa, but the Summer EBT Program fails to address the barriers that exist to healthy and nutritional foods,” Garcia said in a statement. “Iowa’s kids need consistent access to nutritionally dense food, and their families need to feel supported to make healthy choices around food and nutrition. Another benefit card addressed to children is not the way to take on this issue.”

Elzinga disagreed with these arguments, saying that the statements show “our state government does not trust low-income people to make the correct food choices.”

He linked the officials’ remarks to a that would have prevented SNAP participants from purchasing food like fresh meat, bagged salads and sliced cheese.

While that language was removed, Elzinga said the focus on restricting food assistance programs on the basis of nutrition does not help people in need eat healthier. According to a , the most common barrier to a healthy diet for SNAP participants was the affordability of nutritious foods.

Elzinga said while Iowa will not be participating in 2024, he and other hunger advocates plan to make future participation in the Summer EBT program a top priority during the 2024 legislative session.

“We’re going to be working very hard during the legislative session to make sure that Iowa participates in 2025 and every year going forward, because we should not be sitting out again,” he said. “This is federal money for low-income kids during the summer. And it’s not a lot — It’s $120 per kid — but that makes a huge difference for families during the summer who are struggling to feed their kids.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

With that jaunty jingle sung by a chorus of children’s voices, Assistant Cook Jasmine Bumps kicks off her hands-on video cooking lessons for families and children. Today’s episode of “Edu-Cooking” costars two preschool chefs in colorful aprons and matching toques who dutifully plop fruit into frozen yogurt batter and taste fresh-from-the-microwave applesauce they’ve just helped Bumps make.

“Honey is from bees!” exclaims one of the little chefs, who then proceeds to tell Bumps everything he knows about bees as she tries good-naturedly to stir in the honey and keep the show rolling with the recipe.

The preschooler’s oversharing of bee knowledge is both adorable and is the point of the “Edu-Cooking” videos and the various programs of the Educare Learning Network — which includes the Central Maine school — that raise children and families’ awareness of nutrition.

“One of the architectural features of all our schools is that they have kitchens — and many of them have cooks on site,” says Cynthia Jackson, the Educare Learning Network’s executive director and senior vice president at national nonprofit Start Early. “Some of the schools have meals prepared offsite but having an industrial-sized kitchen in each of our Educare schools allows staff to cook some meals and offer cooking classes for the kids and their parents.

“We start with good food—healthy meals and snacks,” Jackson says, “but we also want to build an understanding of nutritious food — where it comes from, how to grow it, and how to prepare it.” Jackson cites a new study from that found when schools fully align their school meal nutrition standards with the , they see improvement in students’ health, well-being and overall academic performance.

The national Educare Learning Network provides high-quality early education via 25 independent birth to 5 schools in under-resourced communities across the U.S. Educare schools can be found in urban, suburban, rural and tribal communities across 15 states, the District of Columbia, and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska Reservation.

A unifying theme in all the schools is the emphasis on healthy eating—though individual schools tailor their approach to that theme according to what works for their community. For some, Jackson says, that means a school garden; for others, it may mean a container garden in the school with pots full of plants placed wherever the sun is best. Some schools grow their veggies at community gardens adjacent to the schools and others have partnerships with organizations in their communities that provide them with nutritional produce.

initiated a three-year pilot nutrition-education program In August 2022 using the pre-K (WISE) curriculum. Developed by the University of Arkansas with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the WISE curriculum provides teachers with the tools and training to promote healthy eating behaviors in pre-K kids. In collaboration with Louisiana Technical University, Educare New Orleans uses the WISE curriculum to increase the number and variety of fruit and vegetable servings children eat. It engages families via social media as well as family meetings with small cooking sessions to help families learn to do more with fruits and vegetables. Kids who might have said they hated fruits and veggies learn to make and ask their parents for a variety of foods — even kale chips.

In addition to its “Edu-Cooking” videos, Educare Central Maine, with nearly a third of its families reporting food insecurity, runs a food pantry set up as a market where families can go shopping for food items. The “Edu-Cooking” lessons play off what’s available from the pantry, such as “What do I do with all this extra bread?” Jasmine’s answer? “Here’s how to make croutons and breadcrumbs! Nothing goes to waste!”

“Edu-Cooking” and the Educare Market both stemmed from the pandemic and the school’s efforts to provide food and necessary supports to its families. According to Erica Palmer, Educare Central Maine’s education manager, when the pandemic began, many families passed on the food offered because they wanted to make sure it went to “those who are truly in need,” even though they were struggling.

“So, we shifted and began to market the resources we had in a different way,” Palmer says. “We put the Educare Market out front and available to all, so our kids would encourage their caregivers to stop by every day and bring things home.

“Our ‘Edu-Cooking’ videos were a fun way to encourage families to use the food we supplied in our market in new and creative ways.”

A dozen Educare schools have gardening programs that introduces the natural world to children and helps them answer the question, “Where does this come from?” Jackson says most of the gardening programs are developed to include foods that fit within the cultural context of the communities they serve.

“They’re growing things that are familiar to the parents in their own communities, as well as things they have maybe never tried before,” she says. “The parents are involved in cooking and nutrition classes, then can take fruit and vegetables from the school garden and cook them at home. They’ve really taken to it—and at some of our schools, our parents are the lead gardeners and they take great pride in that.

“The value of the gardens is that you’re teaching self-directed play and the value of sharing when they’re in the garden. The kids plant seeds and tend the plants and then harvest the food they’ve grown. It is such an exciting process for them.”

Educare’s Ongoing Learning and Sharing

All Educare schools are designed to be demonstration sites that not only deliver high-quality early learning, but also constantly assess and evaluate what works for the children, parents and staff.

“We’re always looking to get better,” Jackson says. “We use data to tell us which child needs intervention or additional individualization to improve their social emotional or cognitive development. We also want to know what parents might need to live their hopes and dreams. Do they want to go back to school? Get a better job? Better housing? We want to help them find the resources to do that.”

Each of the schools is created through a public-private partnership, funded with public dollars such as Head Start, Early Head Start or education dollars from local school districts. The philanthropic partners, starting with an anchor funder, may have ties to the community or to the region. The core foundation of every Educare school is a collaboration—between funders, program providers, school districts, parents and other local community partners—not only to develop and launch the school, but to sustain it over the long run.

“Communities call us and want to be a part of this network,” Jackson says. “Our intention isn’t necessarily to have an Educare school on every corner. Our goal is for our schools to be learning labs where we share what we’re learning with others to improve early childhood in all the organizations that are serving children of this age. Ultimately, the bottom line with the Educare Learning Network is that we want to see the funding streams in America changed so that every child from birth to kindergarten can have high-quality early learning.”

Ensuring that all children have access to nutritious food is a fundamental part of that mission, Jackson says.

“It should be at the top of everyone’s list,” she says. “Poverty in America is hidden from those who don’t want to see it. So, if you’re not in an under-resourced community that doesn’t even have a grocery store, if you’ve always had access to plenty of good food, you’d look at this emphasis on providing nutrition and say, ‘What’s going on here? What are we talking about? All families in America have breakfast, lunch and dinner, don’t they?’

“Well, no they don’t. So, part of what we will do is continue to weigh in, to write letters to our legislators about the importance of funding food security and nutrition in the early childhood education space.”

And in the meantime, Educare will continue to start at the very beginning: good food and nutrition education from the get-go.

According to the (CDC), nearly 13% of preschool children in the U.S. and 21% of 6- to 11-year-olds are classified as overweight or obese. Note: The CDC defines children’s weight status differently from adult Body Mass Index (BMI) categories. Because children’s body composition varies as they age and varies between boys and girls, the BMI levels in children and teens are expressed relative to other children of the same age and sex.  place underweight as less than the 5^th percentile of children of the same age and sex; healthy weight from the 5^th to less than the 85^th percentile; overweight as 85^th to less than the 95^th percentile; and obese as 95^th percentile or greater.

The (NIH) describes childhood obesity as the most challenging public health issue in the 21^st century, and is associated with increased morbidity and premature death. Children who are obese in childhood tend to stay obese into adulthood and face increased risk for diabetes, asthma, cardiac problems and issues such as low self-esteem and anxiety. The NIH paper, “” by James A. Levine, states that obesity-associated chronic disease accounts for 70% of U.S. health costs. The paper further states that halting the U.S. obesity epidemic and lessening its health costs “may require that the U.S. addresses poverty itself.”

Multiple environmental factors influence childhood obesity, but living in a low-income family and in environments and communities that don’t support healthful diets or physical exercise are two of the most substantial risk factors, according to the . Though the CDC recommends children eat healthy food and stay physically active, many children — especially those living in very low-income homes — don’t have ready access to either nutritious food or a place to play freely. According to the NIH, roughly 6% of the people in the U.S. live in a food desert, defined as a geographic area that lacks sufficient access to grocery stores. Economic and racial disparities persist across the U.S., with about 30% more non-white residents facing limited access to retail food outlets than their white counterparts.

Dahlin says early childhood programs can provide an important pathway to launch children on healthier trajectories. Program standards for most early childhood programs require that the children receive some information on nutrition and physical education, though how this information translates into daily interactions can vary from one program to another. Information alone won’t make much of a dent in the complex issue of childhood obesity; Dahlin says a web of approaches is required.

“You can’t just tell families, ‘Eat healthier things,’ if you aren’t addressing the systemic components that affect their health,” she says. “How accessible is food? Can families get there? Is it affordable? Do the children have access to play areas where they can run around, play and be children?”

“Food deserts are in low-economic status neighborhoods without grocery stores or even transportation. Sometimes families are working multiple jobs, so their work schedules make it extremely difficult to get to any type of store with fresh fruits and vegetables. They might have one child in child care and another in school, and they have to take a bus to get each of them. These people are incredibly busy and just trying to access food is challenging and time intensive.”

To solve these challenges, it may not be necessary to reinvent the wheel.

Enter Head Start. Authorized in 1965, Head Start is the longest running publicly funded early learning program in the U.S. It not only provides child care, but it also connects low-income families with the services they need to support their child’s development. Guided by the that was introduced in 2011, Head Start has fostered positive parent-child relationships, community connections and viewed parents as leaders and advocates.

“Head Start provides food when children are attending, and they connect families to resources to support food security outside program hours,” Dahlin says. “That’s essential for learning. Look at — if a child is hungry, they aren’t learning. The program also connects children with primary care providers, dental care and immunizations — all these things that promote good health.”

Head Start collects BMI () information on children in the program within 45 days of entry and uses the information to monitor the well-being of children whose BMI percentiles are in the underweight, overweight or obese range. The NIH considers BMI an economical method to assess body fat indirectly, though the measure has come under scrutiny in recent years because it was developed in the 1800s as part of a quest to determine an average weight for “the average (white, European) man.” The tool is often inaccurate in determining health in women and people of color and has been the source of medical discrimination and weight stigma.

“There has been a lot of understandable push back on using BMI as the metric for health, but we felt that BMI, collected by the programs, could serve as a useful proxy for understanding the effects of Head Start’s contribution to children’s nutrition and physical activity,” Dahlin says. “In the program, children develop food vocabulary and a knowledge base to understand the impact of nutrition and different foods on health. They learn where food comes from. They have consistent access to food, which is a really important takeaway. So, moving away from that one-size-fits-all BMI metric, it’s important that future research take more of a look at what it would mean for children to develop healthy behaviors and to look at that behavior change over time.”

For their study, Dahlin and Reich looked at administrative data from a large urban Head Start program in the Southwest that comprised 26 Head Start centers. Their sample was restricted to 1,120 children with at least two reports of BMI at the 85^th percentile or higher, at points at least 90 days apart. All the children identified as Latine (the researchers prefer the term Latine), their parents spoke Spanish as their primary language and nearly all families reported incomes that fell under the federal poverty level.

What the researchers found was that children in the sample saw a reduction in their BMI over the program year and children with a BMI in the severely obese range experienced a greater, statistically significant, reduction than children who entered the program as overweight or obese. Entry to Head Start at 3 years old predicted a greater reduction in BMI for each month the child was in the program than for children who started later. Having a sibling in the program and receiving a child care subsidy also predicted lower BMI per month.

As is often the case with research, the study created questions that beg more research.

“I think as we transition away from BMI as the measure, we want to consider other ways to measure these health outcomes,” Dahlin says. “We need a lot more qualitative work to understand folks’ experiences and how they interact with food. What are their experiences with some of these food security programs? How do we foster behaviors like positive relationships with food and what systems do we need to set up to make sure folks have access to and an ability to get affordable, healthy food regardless of where they live or how much money they make?

“The bottom line is that the Head Start program is an existing, comprehensive program that is already well set up and well-suited to make a difference in our country’s child health and overweight and obesity issues.”