FOOD FIGHT
Amid tense relations between City Council and the Mayor’s Office, cutting funding for free school meals is on the table.
WRITTEN BY ADAM WILLEMS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MERON MENGHISTAB
[WEDNESDAY, JULY 22] This morning, City Council is scheduled to discuss and vote on a contentious amendment submitted two weeks ago by Council President Joy Hollingsworth and Councilmember Dionne Foster. If passed, the amendment would delay the funding and launch of universal free school meals in Seattle by a year — postponing a program Mayor Katie Wilson announced back in April, hailed at the time by some advocates as a major policy win. Hollingsworth and Foster’s proposal would divert $3 million from universal free school meals to fund six years of a new voucher system, which would provide food over weekends and most school breaks to qualifying students.
In an interview with CHUM News, Hollingsworth said she supports universal free school meals. But a two-month “deep dive” with Councilmember Foster, coupled with conversations with constituents, school staff, and others, led her to see feeding Seattle’s “highest-need students” outside of school as the most urgent task at hand, especially as relevant federal funds dry up under the Trump administration. Prominent community organizations, including King County Equity Now and Community Passageways, issued a joint letter yesterday in favor of the amendment’s “sequenced approach,” which they said may help “ensure that resources reach the children and families with the greatest need.”
“I think this is a compromise,” Hollingsworth said. “Let’s start [universal free school meals] in 2027, and let’s start this [voucher] program now to meet the needs of kids that are not eating during break or can only eat when they go to school.”
However, health experts, teachers, and students interviewed by CHUM News envisioned the reverse of Hollingsworth and Foster's proposal. That is, interviewees saw universal free school meals as the more feasible, healthful option that should be implemented first — if lawmakers really have to choose one program over another. Among others:
An educator at a low-income elementary school in Seattle suggested that the infrastructure was already in place to distribute universal meals. Meanwhile, the voucher program presently lacked “a lot of infrastructure,” and risked generating uneven outcomes by depending on already overworked staff;
A local food-science scholar framed universal free school meals as a “good start” that could tee the voucher program up for success. Such a sequenced approach could encourage participation, eliminate stigma, and provide more nutritious food to more kids, including those “close to the cutoff” who otherwise don’t qualify for free and reduced meals;
And a Seattle high-school student challenged the notion that lawmakers had to choose between funding either universal free school meals or the voucher program this upcoming school year, especially in such a wealthy city.
Hollingsworth and Foster’s proposal has sparked heated political discussions — all while relations between City Council and the Mayor’s Office stay chilly. Councilmembers and legislative staff have at times criticized the Mayor’s Office for proposing new policies without seeking out councilmembers to sponsor the mayor’s bills. Hollingsworth, who has previously made note of a “lack of communication” between the two branches of government, said she and Councilmember Foster first learned about Mayor Wilson’s universal school meals program in April after reading about it in the newspaper. If she had been made aware of the mayor’s idea, Hollingsworth said she would have brought “a different perspective of people to the table” while officials were “crafting the policy and the implementation.”
In May, Mayor Wilson reshuffled her staff and promoted leaders well-versed in the council’s ways; Hollingsworth said the Mayor’s Office and the legislative department “continue to work on” communication, and share a goal of “respect for each office.” Hollingsworth told CHUM News that she and Councilmember Foster have had conversations with Mayor Wilson about their proposal, though, as of yesterday morning, their amendment “stands… as it is” and has not changed.
“I think people want to try to find a pathway forward,” Hollingsworth said. “No one wants a food fight: We're talking about kids and accessibility and food access.”
As City Council determines how it’ll divvy up the city’s six-year, $1.3 billion education levy, whether Seattle will provide free meals for all kids this year — for around $3.5 million — remains debatable.
Under existing federal and state statutes, nearly half of all Seattle Public Schools already provide universal meals. When at least 40 percent of students qualify for free and reduced lunch, then the entire student body can access those meals.
But the process of securing universal meals for a school can still be onerous, according to Melissa Woodbridge, an educator at Bailey Gatzert Elementary School in Yesler Terrace, a designated Title I school where the majority of students are classified as low-income. Funding for universal free school meals depends on paperwork containing parents’ self-reported income, Woodbridge said. Securing those forms can be especially complicated when families are dealing with housing insecurity, busy work schedules, intermittent internet access, and language barriers.
“We have had issues as a school where we get our funding threatened or have other consequences because not enough families have turned in the paperwork to qualify for free and reduced [meals],” she said. “We've had to rally as a staff to really advocate for families and hold sessions at school where we translate the forms, because a lot of families are reluctant to share their income, and especially with ICE, a lot of families feel anxiety around that as well.”
Woodbridge added that kids’ guaranteed access to breakfast and lunch seemed to positively impact attendance. Unrestricted access to meals may also lower the chance that students “bandwagon” around the idea that “school lunch is gross,” she said.
Councilmembers Hollingsworth and Foster have framed their year-long delay to universal free school meals as an opportunity to put a proper system in place for the program. But Woodbridge suggested that, if anything, the infrastructure is already there for universal meals, and, if used for that purpose, can help do away with the “cumbersome” paperwork currently needed from parents. Meanwhile, the proposed voucher program presently lacks “a lot of infrastructure,” she said; without the right systems, tasking school staff with distributing vouchers might create uneven outcomes, as some staff know their students’ needs more extensively than others.
“We’re overworked as it is,” Woodbridge said. “It’s very difficult to do all of it, so that makes me a little bit nervous.”
School districts are required to follow established guidelines to ensure that the meals they serve are nutritious and meet growing kids’ needs. According to Dr. Prithiva Chanmugam, a Seattle-based scholar of food science and a former school food program worker, these meals are (on average) more nutritious than the meals kids might bring from home.
Packed lunches are limited by a lack of refrigeration, and students often devour the snack or dessert in their lunchbox while skipping over the other stuff. In that regard, free universal school meals carry straightforward alimentary benefits, Chanmugam suggested.
But there are more macroscopic social dynamics to consider, too. Universal meals expand participation in mealtimes, eliminate the stigma associated with food from the lunch line, improve student performance, and help foster a “better atmosphere,” Chanmugam said. Free school meals can be a timely health intervention: The earlier students gain exposure to nutritious food and healthful eating practices, the more likely they are to adopt those practices themselves.
“For an overall healthier population, it's better to have a [universal free] school [meal] program,” Chanmugam said. “Free meals should be something that should be considered a good investment for the future.”
It’s also a good investment for the voucher program, she noted. Free universal school meals can reduce the stigma around school-facilitated food access, making students more likely to accept vouchers and secure healthy food.
“It’s a very good point that these children need weekend meals and meals during school breaks,” Chanmugam said. “I think a good start would be universal school meals.”
This year’s funding for universal free school hangs in the balance: in part, an anticipatory casualty of conservative efforts to overturn the recently passed “millionaires tax.” Political group Let’s Go Washington has spearheaded a ballot initiative seeking to overturn the tax before it goes into effect in 2029. If passed in November, the initiative threatens a much-awaited source of education funding in Washington state.
As Hollingsworth and Foster write in their amendment, a one-year delay to the universal school meals program “provides time to see if the long-term viability of this program is at risk” because of legal challenges to the millionaires tax. At City Hall on July 8, Councilmember Foster read a letter from a constituent who shared her apprehensions. Funding universal school meals for two years, only to later cancel the program, “risks eroding community trust rather than building it,” the constituent feared.
Foster has also expressed concern about the use of the levy’s reserve funds to provide universal free school meals. Hollingsworth told CHUM News that unspent funds in the reserves have “usually gone towards preschool.” Hollingsworth and Foster co-authored a different amendment that would delay a voucher pilot for preschool access, and use the diverted funds ($927,710) to fund the meal voucher program.
Miles Hagopian, a Franklin High School student and member of the Seattle Student Union, said lawmakers may do more good by pulling money from other parts of the city budget, rather than diverting funds from other food-access and education programs.
“We're spending so much money on things that aren't helping the people of this city,” he said. “I feel like just the whole idea of having to decide when we should fund money for school meals is pretty crazy.”
Hagopian said the year-long delay to free universal school meals risks stigmatizing free and reduced meals, and could adversely affect the students who don’t currently qualify for the meals, but still encounter financial hardship in a city as expensive as Seattle. Food is an “essential necessity” for learning and for letting students enjoy the school experience, he said. To that end, he struggled to see funding for universal free school meals and for weekend and school-break vouchers as mutually exclusive.
“The fact that we have to decide between [the programs] is crazy,” Hagopian said. “This is literally one of the richest cities in the world.”
The Mayor’s Office did not provide a statement before press time.