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Eight states already offer free school meals to all students regardless of income, including neighboring Michigan and Minnesota. The idea of meals for all has also come up, but has not been adopted, in at least two dozen other states since 2022.

We’re not ready — yet — to get behind a statewide rollout of free meals for all in Wisconsin.

We might be convinced, however, to get behind a pilot initially involving a small number of schools where a high percentage of families earn just above the qualifying line for free and reduced cost meals. These families are being especially hurt by rising grocery prices, struggling without a free and reduced meal safety net to buy breakfast food and to buy or pack daily lunches.

A pilot might answer some key questions, first.

We know that many families who qualify for free and reduced school meals don’t participate because of the stigma of accepting assistance. Universal meals, it’s argued, eliminate that stigma. However, if children tapped for a pilot frequently throw away meals or don’t show up for breakfast, the reason could be less about stigma than about menus not meeting their dietary or cultural needs. Let’s further examine, in a pilot, what’s driving non-participation.

Gov. Tony Evers said in January studies have shown that households whose children receive free breakfast and lunch spend up to $39 less per month on groceries, or roughly $460 less per year. That might be bad for Wisconsin grocers, especially if a pilot were later expanded to families of higher incomes, who tend to spend even more at the grocery store. Let’s test out this impact in a small scale pilot, to make sure we’re not setting grocers up for a statewide hit.

Let’s not overlook the new tax impact on families that would cut into their grocery savings. Gov. Evers and state Superintendent Jill Underly say it would cost an additional $294 million in the 2025-27 biennium to expand free breakfast and lunch to all K-12 public, private and charter school students. What’s the expected average new tax hit per household?

Let’s track, as part of a pilot, the academic performance of participating children. A key premise of universal school meals is that all children do better academically. Let’s gather some data on this, on a small scale for now.

Let’s examine as part of a pilot how school nutrition staff would benefit from less red tape. They’d no longer have to manage a three-tiered — paid, reduced, free — meal program and related reimbursements, nor have to manage student lunch debt. Let’s see, on a small scale, what that looks like.

Finally, let’s structure a pilot to pull in Wisconsin school buildings and school districts that currently don’t participate in the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) program, that was rolled out nationwide between 2011 and 2014. It provides free breakfast and lunch to all children in a school district or school building where 25 percent of families qualify for free meals, and who have other circumstances, such as being homeless, being in a migrant family, being enrolled in Head Start, being covered by Medicaid, participating in supplemental food programs like SNAP or being in foster care.

In the School District of Janesville, 67% of students qualified for free or reduced lunch in 2023, or about 6,400 of the school district’s 9,500 students. All but two Janesville elementary schools and one middle school — Harrison and Kennedy elementary and Marshal Middle School — also now participate in CEP.

However, only about 70 of Wisconsin’s more than 400 public school districts, including Janesville, currently participate in CEP. And only about 600 school buildings currently participate in CEP, about 150 those private/parochial and charter schools. According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, there are more than 2,000 K-12 public school buildings across the state, including charter schools.

That leaves plenty of schools and school districts available to participate in a small-scale, free meals for all pilot program.

In tandem with a pilot, let’s bring our state elected officials and congressional delegation together to talk about the full range of possible solutions here in Wisconsin and nationwide.

In October 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service lowered the threshold for a school or school district to participate in the CEP program, from 40% down to 25% of students qualifying for free breakfast and lunch. There was a resulting spike in school districts across the nation signing up. Could the threshold be lowered further to cover even more kids? That’s worth exploring.

Also worth exploring is further raising the income thresholds for the free and reduced lunch and breakfast programs, so more families qualify. The USDA reassesses those income levels annually, and updated them for 2024-25. A family of four now earning up to $40,560 a year qualifies for free meals. A family of four earning up to $57,720 a year now qualifies for reduced-cost meals. During the 2022–2023 school year, a family of four earning up to $36,075 qualified for free meals. A family of four earning up to $51,338 qualified for reduced-price meals in 2022-23. Should the USDA take this even higher?

Not all Wisconsin school children need free lunch and breakfast. According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, in 2023-24, the percentage of children that qualified for free and reduced meals varied widely across the state, from 100 percent in the Milwaukee Public Schools, to 10% in Cedarburg and 8 percent in Fox Point.

How might Wisconsin ensure that children who most need meals get them, while respecting state taxpayers’ pocketbooks? How might more children be brought under the existing umbrellas of the free and reduced school lunch and breakfast programs, and the CEP program?

That’s worth examining in Wisconsin in a limited-scope pilot. We look forward to the conversation.