Heather Gustafson knows what it’s like to struggle to keep money in her children’s meal accounts at school. Now a Minnesota state senator, Gustafson spent several years as a single mother raising four kids on a modest teacher’s salary.

Although she suspects her income would’ve qualified her children to receive free or reduced-price school lunch, she never completed the paperwork to determine their eligibility.

“One of the reasons I didn’t fill out the form was because I assumed that it … was some cumbersome thing that I had to prove with a bunch of forms,” she said. “There was also this shame of, like, ‘Well, maybe, if I just get a second job, then it won’t be so embarrassing.’”

Thanks to universal school meals legislation that Gustafson and Rep. Sydney Jordan sponsored in the state legislature, Minnesota parents will no longer have to worry about keeping their kids fed at school. The law provides free lunch and breakfast to the state’s K-12 students regardless of household income. Signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz in the spring, the legislation took effect July 1 and will cost Minnesota about $400 million in the program’s first two years.

Minnesota’s universal free meal legislation is part of a burgeoning national movement to provide all students with no-cost breakfast and lunch. Through the end of the 2021-22 school year, the federal government provided free meals as part of its pandemic response, no matter a family’s ability to pay. That effort gave Minnesota and five other states — California, Maine, Colorado, New Mexico and Vermont — the momentum to pass free school meal legislation.

The lawmakers and advocates who fought to implement Minnesota’s Free School Meals Program expect it to improve student health, behavior, attendance and performance; end the stigma associated with receiving free or reduced-price lunch; and stop lunch shaming practices in which students without money for meals are overtly or covertly penalized.

Read the full article about universal free school lunch by Nadra Nittle at The 19th.