Although Maine made school meals free for all students during the school year, providing access to free lunch and breakfast over the summer for school-aged children remains a challenge. That challenge is compounded by declining participation in summer meals, after the expiration of pandemic-era waivers brought back some barriers to access.

A new report from the national nonprofit, Food Research and Action Center, analyzed participation in summer meal programs for each state, including the number of sites, sponsors and total meals served, based on United States Department of Agriculture data. 

Experts said Maine’s summer meal program does better than most states in reaching children who need meals, but there continue to be significant barriers to access, predominantly due to the federal policies governing these programs. According to this report, released this month, participation in summer meals decreased nationally in 2023 as most programs returned to normal operations. 

In Maine, both sponsors and sites offering meals to school-aged children over the summer saw small declines from 2022 to 2023.

“Maine is, in general, doing better than most other states at trying to feed the kids in the state who need it,” said Justin Strasburger, executive director of Full Plates, Full Potential, a statewide nonprofit organization working to address food insecurity. 

“But essentially, what you’re looking at is a very, very low bar that’s connected to a summer meals program that needs massive overhauls in terms of structure and approach.”

From 2020 to 2022, any school district, government agency or nonprofit organization could  sponsor a summer meals program, and get reimbursed by the federal government through USDA’s Summer Food Service Program. Sponsors also weren’t required to adhere to typical USDA rules of how to run their sites (for example, parents could pick up grab-and-go meals at any site, as opposed to requiring students to eat on site.)

During those years, participation in summer meals surged nationwide because of the waivers and ease of access. At the same time, breakfast and lunch were also free for all students during the year. 

After the pandemic, Maine became one of a handful of states to pass legislation making school meals free, which retained increased participation in breakfast and lunch during the regular school year statewide. However, the summer meals program returned to its regular policies, and participation declined.

The number of sponsors — who can be school districts, or nonprofit and community organizations — decreased from 116 to 106, and the number of sites where families can access free meals over the summer also dropped from 446 to 410, according to the FRAC report. The drop in the number of sites serving summer meals from 2021 — when pandemic-era waivers were still in place – to 2022 is much more stark, with almost a 50 percent drop from 861 sites in summer 2021.

“My guess is that most of those stopped because they had been sort of operating through loopholes created by the pandemic,” Strasburger said. 

Meanwhile, according to Feeding America, 1 in 5 children face hunger in Maine.

Corresponding to this decline in sites and sponsors, the average daily participation numbers in summer meals as captured in the FRAC report declined sharply from 2021 to 2022, going from more than 22,000 to just over 14,000 and continued to drop in  2023. Last year’s average daily participation in summer meals was about 12,600.

Despite the decline in access, summer meals still serve a large number of students that qualify for free and reduced meals during the school year, especially compared with other states, according to the report. Over last summer, Maine served more than 400,000 summer meals, based on federal data. 

Maine is ranked third in the country in terms of access to free summer meals according to a metric FRAC developed, comparing what percentage of students that qualify for free and reduced meals during the school year participate in summer meal programs. The state is somewhat successful because of the focus of state agencies, communities and sponsors on expanding access to summer meals, which isn’t the case in every state, according to Crystal FitzSimons, FRAC’s interim president. 

“The way they operate the program, the amount of outreach they do, the quality of the meals that they serve, those things all contribute to high participation,” she said.

The Maine Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the summer meals program.

How federal policies limit Maine’s summer meal program

The way the USDA’s Summer Food Service Program is designed creates challenges in allowing all students to access summer meals, Strasburger said.

To qualify as a summer meals site, at least 50 percent of the children in the geographic area or participating in summer meals have to be eligible for free or reduced-price school meals. 

However, since far fewer families are filling out free and reduced price meal applications ever since the state introduced universal free meals throughout the school year, this calculation is complicated in Maine. The rural nature of the state also adds to the issue of eligibility of free meal sites, according to FitzSimons. 

“Maine is a really hard state for summer food. It’s really rural, and it also doesn’t have the same kind of concentration of poverty that you might see in other rural states with higher rates of child poverty,” FitzSimons said. 

“So it’s harder to qualify sites because there’s plenty of kids who come from low income households in Maine, but the concentration of poverty is not as high.”

One of FRAC’s recommendations in its 2024 report includes lowering the federal eligibility  threshold to 40 percent, so more sites are able to offer summer meals.

The other issue is also a federal program requirement that students must eat meals on-site, which a majority of Maine’s summer meals sites still have to follow. Sponsors are not required to provide educational or enrichment activities in conjunction with on-site meals, but it is best practice to do so, according to FitzSimons.

“If you have a site that doesn’t have activity or enrichment, and you’re in a rural area,

it’s not going to make sense financially for the family to drive to a meal site for one meal for their child,” she said.

Some potential solutions to boost participation 

This summer, due to an updated definition of rural areas, Maine was able to expand grab-and-go meal sites, although they still can’t operate in densely populated centers. USDA also released a map of all summer meal sites, including grab-and-go locations.

This year, Maine also introduced a grocery credit of $120 per child for all qualifying children to supplement summer meals. The program, called SUN bucks, is not new at the federal level, but many states have implemented it this school year, as a way to continue serving students meals after pandemic-era waivers expired, FitzSimons said.

Nearly 100,000 students were automatically enrolled in SUN bucks this summer because they qualify for other programs, such as SNAP or TANF, according to the Maine Department of Education website.

School-aged children can also qualify for the grocery credit if they are eligible for free and reduced meals during the school year.

The lack of accurate data in Maine

After Maine made all school meals free, the state has been struggling to accurately calculate how many students qualify for free and reduced meals, which is an important economic metric which then allows families to qualify for other benefits, including summer meals and grocery credits.

Since far fewer families are filling out free and reduced price meal applications ever since the state introduced universal free meals throughout the school year, the state department of education is working on alternative models to determine eligibility, for example, partnering with other state agencies to directly qualify students who are eligible for MaineCare.

Meanwhile, the FRAC report relies on free and reduced eligibility data to determine how well a state is doing with summer meals. According to the report, states should be reaching 40 students with summer meals for every 100 who received a school lunch during the 2022–2023 regular school year. 

In 2023, the report said Maine reached 31.8 children with summer lunch for every 100 children, which is the third highest in the country. However, since this calculation used free and reduced lunch data, which is undercounted, the actual ratio may be lower.