The problem
School meal eligibility followed federal income cutoffs written for the whole country. They take no account of what it costs to live here, so families earning too much to qualify and too little to absorb the cost paid full price. Under the law we eventually passed, a family of four earning up to about $113,800 now qualifies — which tells you how far the old cutoffs sat from the real cost of living.
Free meals for every student, which is what we wanted, failed in 2023 and again in 2024.
What I did
I led policy and advocacy for one of the four organizations running the coalition. I drafted the universal free meals bills in 2024 and 2026, testified on the school meals bills in every session from 2023 through 2026, spoke for the campaign in print and on the radio, and coached the advocates who carried it — including a teacher whose work on this campaign led to a teacher-of-the-year nomination.
The strategy
Start with the whole ask
Universal free meals is the simplest policy to administer and the easiest to explain. We ran it first, twice.
Prove the public was already there
We commissioned polling that found 82% of voters supported free school meals. That changed the question from whether people wanted it to what it would cost.
Propose the compromise ourselves
After the second failure, rather than run the same bill a third time, we put forward a version that extended eligibility to families at or below 300% of the federal poverty level, phased over two years. Proposing the fallback ourselves meant we set where the line landed instead of having it set for us.
Widen the bench
Teachers, parents and county officials carried the argument in places I couldn’t. Coaching them was the work that made the difference.
Keep the original bill alive
We backed the 300% version and kept introducing universal meals.
The outcome
Act 139 (2025), signed in May 2025.
- Year one (2025–26): students who had been paying the reduced price eat free — about 11,000 students.
- Year two (2026–27): every student in a family at or below 300% of the federal poverty level eats free — nearly 12,000 more, on top of the roughly 73,000 already eligible.
- The law also bars schools from denying a child a meal over an unpaid balance.
What we still haven’t won
Meals for every student. The 2026 bill didn’t pass either. We took the 23,000 students we could get and kept the rest on the table.