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Tag: Children’s Defense Fund Ohio

  • Majority of Ohioans are in favor of universal free school meal program, according to poll

    Majority of Ohioans are in favor of universal free school meal program, according to poll

    Students getting their l lunch at a primary school. Photo by Amanda Mills/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    By:  – Ohio Capital Journal

    Two-thirds of Ohioans support a universal free school breakfast and lunch program for all public school children, according to a Republican research firm.

    “This is extremely rare in a time where voters are really reluctant to support further spending, either at the state or federal level,” Alexi Donovan, vice president of Tarrance Group Polling, said Monday during the Ohio Legislative Children’s Caucus monthly meeting.

    This month’s meeting heard testimony on the importance of universal school meals and Tarrance Group Polling surveyed 600 Ohio voters about this topic in May.

    “It is clear from the research and the data over the years, universal school meals help students thrive, physically, mentally, socially and educationally,” said John Stanford, director of Children’s Defense Fund–Ohio.

    In Ohio, 1 in 6 children, or about 413,000 kids, live in a household that experiences hunger. Despite that, more than 1 in 3 children who live in a food insecure household do not qualify for school meals, according to a 2023 report from Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio.

    “We believe that in a country as wealthy as we are, we should not have hungry children,” said Lisa Quigley, director of Solving Hunger.

    Exposing students to various fruits and vegetables through school meals helps them get a taste for “food that’s far more nutritious than what a lot of them are bringing to school,” she said.

    “What we’re finding in the schools that are doing universal school meals, the food is getting better,” Quigley said.

    National security

    Children’s hunger is a national security issue, said Cynthia Rees, Ohio’s director for the Council for a Strong America.

    The U.S. Department of Defense conducted a study in 2020 that found 77% of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible for military service without a waiver. The most prevalent disqualification rate was for being overweight at 11%, above drug and alcohol abuse (8%) and medical/physical health (7%).

    “It is critical to recognize that overweight and obesity can often be manifestations of malnutrition, food insecurity or the lack of access to affordable healthy foods often result in consuming cheaper and more accessible food, which often lack nutritional value,” Rees said.

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    The food insecurity rate for Ohio children is 15%, with some counties having rates up to 24%, Rees said.

    “Increasing children’s access to fresh and nutritious food now, including through free school meals for all students, could help America recover from the present challenges and bolster national security in the future,” she said. “The military has a long standing interest in the health and nutrition of our nation’s youth.”

    Universal school meals would eliminate the stigma of categorizing students who receive free and reduced meals and those that don’t, Rees said.

    “Instead, all students can just have a meal together,” she said. “When we make school meals accessible to all, we remove that stigma.”

    Ohio legislation

    Last year’s budget bill allowed any student who qualified for free or reduced school breakfast or lunch got those meals for free during the 2023-24 school year.

    Currently in Ohio, children are eligible for free or reduced school meals if their household income is up to 185% of the federal poverty line, which is $57,720 for a family of four, according to the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

    State Reps. Darnell Brewer, D-Cleveland, and Ismail Mohamed, D-Columbus, introduced a bill earlier this year that would require public schools to provide a meal to any student that asks.

    House Bill 408 would also ban a district from throwing away a meal after it was served “because of a student’s inability to pay for the meal or because money is owed for previously provided meals.” The has only had sponsor testimony so far in the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee.

    Follow OCJ Reporter Megan Henry on X.

    Megan Henry
    Megan Henry

    Megan Henry is a reporter for the Ohio Capital Journal and has spent the past five years reporting in Ohio on various topics including education, healthcare, business and crime. She previously worked at The Columbus Dispatch, part of the USA Today Network.

    Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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  • Child Care Crisis a Barrier to Economic Mobility for Ohio Families

    Child Care Crisis a Barrier to Economic Mobility for Ohio Families

    From Public News Service

    Ohio ranks 29th among states in overall child well-being, according to the latest Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Book.

    Child care continues to pose challenges for working parents, and the new data showed average child care costs for one child in 2021 topped $10,000 per year.

    Kelly Vyzral, senior health policy associate for the Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio, said women are five to eight times more likely than men to experience negative employment consequences related to caregiving. Lack of affordable child care also disproportionately affects families of color and immigrant families.

    “We can’t expect parents — and many times this is especially relevant for single moms — we can’t expect them to go back to work, if they don’t have a safe place to leave their children,” Vyzral asserted.

    In 2021, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows Ohio hit a twenty-year low in the number of child care workers, with around 12,000 across 88 counties. According to the report, the nation’s already insufficient child care workforce dropped by more than a third in just two months at the beginning of the pandemic, and has since rebounded to 996,000 workers by April 2023, still far below pre-pandemic levels.

    An executive order issued by President Biden this year aims to expand child care access by lowering costs and raising worker wages.

    Vyzral acknowledged it is a start, and pointed out state lawmakers should continue to implement policies aimed at addressing the crisis.

    “There’s money in the budget for those publicly funded child care centers,” Vyzral argued. “And there’s also scholarships for spots within those child care centers for workers. So for the people that are working in these day care centers, to send their children to day care, because they often in order to work, have to have some place to put their children.”

    Nationwide, the average salary for a child care worker was around $29,000 per year or around $14 an hour in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    author Eric Tegethoff, Producer

    Disclosure: The Annie E. Casey Foundation contributes to our fund for reporting on Children’s Issues, Education, Juvenile Justice, and Welfare Reform. If you would like to help support news in the public interest, click here.
  • Report: Rate of uninsured Ohio children rises significantly

    Report: Rate of uninsured Ohio children rises significantly

    After hitting a historically low rate in 2016, the number of uninsured children has gradually grown to eliminate progress made in the country. Ohio, alone, had a double-digit jump in the three-year study.

    Susan TebbenSusan Tebben is an award-winning journalist with a decade of experience covering Ohio news, including courts and crime, Appalachian social issues, government, education, diversity and culture. She has worked for The Newark Advocate, The Glasgow Daily Times, The Athens Messenger, and WOUB Public Media. She has also had work featured on National Public Radio.

    Nationally, the rate of children not covered by medical insurance was down to 4.7% in 2016, but started to increase again the year after, according to a new study by Georgetown University Health Policy Institute’s Center for Children and Families.

    In 2019, the rate had jumped to 5.7%, an increase of 726,000 more children since the Trump Administration took office in 2016, the study showed.

    “Much of the gain in coverage that children made as a consequence of the Affordable Care Act’s major coverage expansions implemented in 2014 has now been eliminated,” the study noted in its key findings.

    The data was collected from single-year estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey from the three years.

    Ohio was one of several states that saw an increase of more than 20,000 uninsured children from 2016 to 2019.

    Ohio’s uninsured rate went up 26% from 2016 to 2019. Data from 2019 show 131,000 Ohio children without insurance, up from 104,000 in 2016.

    Ohio child health advocates say a lack of health insurance contributes to worse life outcomes, which extend to education and societal shortcomings.

    “This damaging trend will have long-term consequences for children and communities across Ohio because without health coverage, children cannot access the care they need to grow and thrive,” said Tracy Najera, executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund Ohio, in response to the study.

    The study attributed declines in Medicaid enrollment as the start of the decrease in insured children. Public coverage for children includes Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

    The largest national increase in uninsured children, 320,000, came between 2018 and 2019, and represents the largest annual jump in more than a decade, the authors of the study said.

    “Moreover, since this data was collected prior to the pandemic, the number of uninsured children is likely considerably higher in 2020, as families have lost their jobs and employer-sponsored insurance, though it is impossible to know yet by precisely how much,” the study stated.

    The study comes as some K-12 schools see spikes in COVID-19 rates, and cases in ages 0-19 represent the fifth highest age group in the state, according to state data.

    Texas and Florida had the highest rates, representing 41% of the overall increase in child non-coverage, with about 1 million children in Texas lacking health insurance in 2019, and an estimated 343,000 uninsured children in Florida.