Let there still be school lunch!

About 94% of the nation’s schools are participating in the National School Lunch Program, which reimburses schools for the meals they serve and provides food at lower cost to feed lower-income students. Under the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, if 40 percent of students in a school qualify for free lunches, all students at the school are eligible for a free lunch.

 Now the House of Republicans wants to change this and raise the percentage to 60%. Conservative lawmakers are well known for wanting to cut funding to public education and this bill does the opposite of what it claims to do. This change would affect more than 7, 000 schools and threaten free and reduced price lunches to nearly 3.4 million students.

Public schools across the nation are still reeling from years of budget cuts as most states continue to fund schools less than what they did in the past. Low-income students are now the majority in public schools nationwide, with nearly one in five schools classified as a “high poverty” school.

This bill will only risks damaging low-income students’ physical and mental development and ability to learn in school, subject vulnerable school children to humiliation and hunger, burdens schools with more paperwork and costs.

For the majority of schools, these changes are pretty challenging to follow.

So please sign this petition and let the United States House of Representatives know that what they want to do is not ok!