Another bill has entered the Ohio General Assembly in an attempt to address student hunger in schools, this time in the form of a Democratic measure that would still hold households accountable for student meal debt, but keep the child from feeling the consequences.

State Reps. Darnell Brewer, D-Cleveland, and Ismail Mohamed, D-Columbus, introduced House Bill 97 in a Tuesday hearing of the Ohio House Education Committee. The bill would require public schools to provide a meal to any student and bars districts from requiring “chores” or other activities from students due to outstanding meal debt. The bill also requires the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to “provide guidance” to districts and schools about the collection of student meal debt.

“It’s a really common-sense solution to something that has been happening for so long and has such a negative impact on kids,” Mohamed told the committee on Tuesday.

Brewer and Mohamed pointed to statistics in their testimony to the committee that show more than 1.6 million Ohioans are considered food insecure, with 1 in 6 children in the state living in poverty in 2023.

Brewer said ideally, the “most sustainable and compassionate way” to address the problem would be with mandatory participation in the federal Community Eligibility Provision – a program that allows schools with large numbers of low-income children to serve free breakfast and lunch to all students in the school – or with a universal breakfast and lunch program in the state.

The Community Eligibility Provision’s future is uncertain as federal budget reconciliation continues. Back in January, a document from the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee listed potential cuts to the national budget through reconciliation, which included raising the threshold for school districts to qualify for the provision.

Eligibility is based on the amount of households in a school and district that receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funding. The document release in January proposed raising the eligibility from 40% of students in a school who receive the program assistance, to 60%.

The Food Research & Action Center has said the changes to the provision, which it found served more than 23 million children nationwide in the last school year, would “worsen childhood hunger, hurt struggling families and create unnecessary burdens for schools and districts.”

“Community eligibility is a proven success, ensuring tens of millions of students have access to nutritious meals while easing burdens on families and schools,” said Crystal FitzSimons, interim president of FRAC in a Tuesday statement on the provision’s uncertainty. “Instead of cutting community eligibility, (federal) lawmakers should be expanding it to allow more high-need schools and districts to adopt the options.”

Ohio-specific data on the impact of the provision from the Food Research & Action Center and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found the cuts would mean 728 schools in the state would not be able to provide free school meals, and more than 287,000 children would no longer have access to free meals through the provision.

Columbus Public Schools alone would see 110 schools and more than 44,000 students impacted by the changes, if implemented.

The sponsors said Ohio’s H.B. 97 wasn’t a way to allow parents and guardians to be released from the debt they owe, considering districts have to pay the debt whether the parents are accountable or not.

“We’re not letting the parents get away with the debt, what we’re saying in this bill is that the student will still be served,” Brewer said.

The bill is a way to get food that is already ready to be served to the students to those kids without the recognition that a student is part of the federal National School Lunch Program, or any other program that provides students from low-income households access to lunch at no cost or a reduced cost.

“All it does is just refocus where our priorities lie,” Mohamed said.

Schools would be prohibited from discarding a meal because the student isn’t able to pay for it, and it would ban “publicly identifying or stigmatizing a student who cannot pay for a meal or owes a meal debt,” according to an analysis of H.B. 97 by the Legislative Service Commission.

Guidance from the ODEW about school debt would include “best practices” and information on the establishment of an online system to allow payment of the debt, under the bill.

The bill comes shortly after comments were made by House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, rebuffing efforts to create a universal school breakfast and lunch program. According to reporting from the Statehouse News Bureau, Huffman made comments last week that a program like that would have a “huge amount of waste,” and many Ohio parents can pay for breakfast and lunch already.

A member of Huffman’s own party is part of a bipartisan effort that would do just that, and the public has expressed support for such a program. The legislature seemed to be somewhat swayed as well, at least in the previous state operating budget, when eligibility for free lunches was raised to include those who qualified for reduced-price lunches. It fell short of hopes for a universal meal program, but was praised as progress when the measure was implemented in the budget.

State Sen. Bill Blessing, R-Colerain Twp., who is a co-sponsor of the bipartisan bill to create a universal school meal program, said he wants to push for the language of his bill to appear in the new state budget, which is currently in the legislature, pushing toward a July 1 deadline.