New York lawmakers want to tweak the guidelines of the state’s farm to school program in the budget. They said it’s a healthy change that would benefit New York students, state farmers and state’s agricultural economy.
State Assemblywoman Donna Lupardo is the Assembly Agriculture Committee chair. She is sponsoring this proposal in her house.
“It’s been disappointing that over a number of years even though there’s a substantial amount of money allocated each year, around $10 million, that only less than 10% of the eligible schools are participating,” said Lupardo.
Established in 2018, the 30% New York State Initiative encourages schools to spend at least 30% of their food budget on eligible state products. Doing so increases a school’s reimbursement from 59 cents to 25 cents.
It’s an effort to leverage school meals to support New York farmers while providing quality food to students.
“This is a win-win not only for these kids, for the farmers that we want to support, and we want to ensure a program that we fought for actually works,” said state Sen. Shelley Meyer, chair of the Senate Education Committee.
“Now let’s overcome the bureaucracy and the red tape and let’s make sure that it can be done and done well,” said state Sen. George Borrello, ranking Member of Senate Ag Committee.
Lawmakers say the issue is the program only supports school lunches. They want it expanded to include all school meals since schools have a difficult time splitting their buying budget to only use the program to buy for school lunches.
Lawmakers said this could help make better use of funds allocated since right now, only about $3 million is being used, leaving more than $7 million on the table.
“This moment, in this budget session, right now is the right time to do it to make sure we’re expanding the universal school meals program that all of those meals are good, farm-fresh healthy foods,” said state Sen. Michelle Hinchey, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
An audit from the state comptroller’s office found out of more than 700 schools that are eligible only around 70 are taking part.
A key part of lawmaker’s proposal is making sure the schools that are already participating are supported in transition if this program is expanded so they’re not penalized since they’ll have to purchase more.