School authorities are calling for greater support for child nutrition programs in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The nonprofit group Mission: Readiness, which focuses on recruiting young adults for military service, hosted a virtual forum on child nutrition Thursday.
The group’s biggest concern, according to a press release, “the fact that 71% of 17-24 year olds across the country and 74% in Arkansas are ineligible for military service due to obesity” is one of the top disqualifiers. “
The forum featured guest speakers from the organization of over 800 retired generals and admirals as well as from the Little Rock School District. The focus of the event was on the increased need for school meals and ensuring that nutritional requirements were met.
Stephanie Walker Hynes, director of child nutrition at LRSD, says the number of students receiving meals at school has increased since the pandemic began. During the virtual forum, she announced that an elementary school’s service had increased from 200 to 600 students per day.
“We fed over 140,000 breakfasts in November … that’s great evidence of our work,” said Hynes.
She added that around half of the district’s 22,000 or so students are fed in schools every day.
“I would like to see universal meals,” said Hynes, “I think if there was a universal meal system like in other countries we could take that off the table.”
According to Hynes, LRSD feeds every child for free, thanks in large part to federal funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National School Lunch Program.
She suggested that school districts should take a different approach, focusing on marketing their nutrition programs to counter the traditionally negative stigma surrounding school lunches.
Lance Whitney, director of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance, said, “For every US dollar of federal funding, a minimum of US $ 1.50 and up to US $ 1.78 will be donated to this community, because it enables parents to earn money to work so that there is no loss of wages or work, enables the children to stay in school. “
