NYHealth submitted the following comments in support of a proposed U.S. Department of Agriculture rule that would expand access to healthy foods for families with school-age children through summer meal programs:
August 27, 2024
Kevin Maskornick
Director, Community Meals Policy Division
Food and Nutrition Service
United States Department of Agriculture
1320 Braddock Place
Alexandria, VA 22314
Docket ID: FNS-2023-0029-0001
Re: Establishing the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer Program and Rural Non-Congregate Option in the Summer Meal Programs
Dear Mr. Maskornick:
The New York Health Foundation (NYHealth) submits these comments in support of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Interim Final Rule (IFR) Establishing Summer EBT and Rural Non-Congregate Option in the Summer Meal Programs. We applaud USDA’s efforts to expand access to healthy foods for families with school-age children, and suggest several ways to ensure equitable access, consistent with the spirit of the proposed rule.
NYHealth is a private foundation that works to improve the health of all New Yorkers, especially people of color and others who have been historically marginalized. Our Healthy Food, Healthy Lives program works to advance policies and programs that connect New Yorkers with the food they need to thrive. Our work has provided us with in-depth knowledge of how food insecurity harms children and their families, as well as the ways programs like Summer EBT improve New York families’ lives.
In its inaugural year, Summer EBT is projected to reach more than 2 million students and bring an additional $200 million into our State, vastly improving the food purchasing power of New York families with children. This program has the potential to reduce childhood hunger during the months when schools are closed. To maximize the program’s potential, we urge USDA to consider the following recommended improvements.
Grant states the ability to define “school-age” children.
The eligibility criteria proposed in the current IFR would leave many low-income New York students without the Summer EBT benefits they need. The IFR defines “school-age” as the age range for which a state compels children to attend school, as opposed to the age range for which the state provides free primary and secondary education. In New York, the mandatory ages for school are six to sixteen. But many four- and five-year-olds attend universal pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, and many adolescents over age 16 are, thankfully, still enrolled in secondary school.
We encourage the USDA to allow states to define “school-age” as the ages for which the state provides free public education to children and adolescents. Enabling states to define “school-age” children will help to ensure that all children who need the benefits have access to them. This change would also reduce the administrative burden and the errors that can occur when data-matching from school rosters.
Streamline expungement timelines.
Current Summer EBT guidance would require states to expunge benefits 122 days after issuance. This short expungement timeframe may reduce benefits usage, given the administrative challenges and delays that are likely to arise rolling out a new program.
As proposed, the 122-day countdown begins when benefits are deposited into a child’s Summer EBT account, possibly before a child has received an active card to access benefits. With Pandemic EBT, our partners received calls from families whose benefits were expunged before they even received active cards. During this period, the customer service channels through which families could request replacement cards were often at capacity and even backlogged for several weeks.
Based on the lessons learned from Pandemic EBT, we recommend that USDA allow expungement timelines to reset after each Summer EBT benefit use. Resetting expungement timelines would keep the program consistent with statutory language that limits the expungement timeline to four months and with New York’s SNAP benefit expungement process.
Replace stolen benefits.
“Card skimming” has become a problem in electronic benefit transfer programs in recent years. For example, in the past two years, SNAP recipients in New York have reported more than 134,000 fraudulent transactions. Each fraudulent incident leaves families unexpectedly without access to food benefits upon which they rely.
Congress has previously directed USDA to replace stolen SNAP benefits; Summer EBT, like SNAP, should allow participants to recover benefits. The National School Lunch Act, which authorizes Summer EBT, does not restrict USDA from replacing stolen Summer EBT benefits. The agency has already committed to replace benefits in cases of household misfortune or disaster. We encourage USDA to expand replacement protocols to include stolen benefits, an event that is also out of families’ control.
We applaud USDA for its efforts to reduce food insecurity for school-age children and families during summer months. To further strengthen Summer EBT, we urge the agency to consider the proposed improvements outlined in this comment. Ultimately, these efforts will help ensure that New York families have the food they need to thrive.
Thank you for the opportunity to provide comments. If you have additional questions, please reach out to Julia McCarthy, Senior Program Officer.
Sincerely,
David Sandman, Ph.D.
President & CEO
New York Health Foundation
