Kansas Republican morphs free lunch bill to give reduced-lunch students free meals

Sens. Cindy Holscher, D-Overland Park, and Doug Shane, R-Louisburg, appear at a May 2025 meeting of the Senate Committee on Government Efficiency, or COGE, which was created to weed out waste, fraud and abuse in Kansas government. (Photo by Morgan Chilson/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — Kansas Republicans want to give every student who qualifies for reduced lunch two free meals a day.

Sen. Doug Shane, a Louisburg Republican, pitched the deal Tuesday as a way to ensure Kansas children don’t go hungry, and it happens to meet one of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s policy goals. But the proposal to cover the residual costs of reduced lunch with state dollars is embedded in a bill that seeks to change how funding for at-risk students is allocated.

The Senate Committee on Government Efficiency heard the original bill on Jan. 29, where opponents and neutral state agencies worried about conflicting with federal law, pushing unfunded mandates, increasing administrative duties and adding burdens to struggling families.

Sen. Cindy Holscher, an Overland Park Democrat running for governor, said Tuesday the same concerns remain despite Shane’s changes.

Shane changed Senate Bill 387 considerably, eliminating the original text requiring schools to verify the income of all households that qualify for free meals under the national school lunch program. In its place, he added a new requirement mandating schools verify every school year that each student deemed at-risk also qualifies for free meals with written evidence of a student’s household gross income.

The state’s at-risk funding is tied to free-lunch program participation and calculated based on the number of students receiving free lunches.

Without evidence of qualification, students will not be deemed at-risk but could still apply for the national school lunch program. The switch-up, in theory, allows the state to contribute fewer funds to students who are at risk of academic failure. The additional cost of covering meal copays for kids who qualify for reduced price meals would total $2.5 million annually, Shane estimated, but appropriations committees must follow through with an allocation.

He said the new language clears up potential conflicts with federal law. He didn’t see the unfunded bill as burdensome if schools only have to “simply ask for a couple of papers of evidence” to do a “quick check.”

Grace Hoge, a spokesperson for the governor, said in a statement Shane’s bill would jeopardize millions in school funding and cause more children to go hungry. If the bill’s income verification requirements go into effect, they could violate U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations and force Kansas to risk $250 million meant for the school lunch program, she said.

The modification of the at-risk financing formula could run afoul of existing case law and throw Kansas back in court, Hoge said. However, the governor remains committed to feeding hungry students, she said.

Additional language giving the Legislature the power to approve or deny a school’s participation in the USDA Community Eligibility Provision program, which offers free meals to all students at high-poverty schools, remained in the bill.

Haley Kottler, Kansas Appleseed’s senior campaign director, urged opposition to the bill in a call to action message to the organization’s supporters.

Shane’s amendment to eliminate the reduced price meal copay was a step in the right direction, she said in an interview. The bill’s other two components she called “egregious” and “wrong.”

Appleseed, a legal advocacy organization, has worked closely with schools to support free meals to all students through the federal Community Eligibility Provision, Kottler said. The program feeds around 50,000 kids across the state, she said.

“Bills like SB 387 really do make you question where lawmakers’ hearts are at,” she said.

The bill was rooted in a complicated state audit presented to legislative committees multiple times in recent weeks. At the government efficiency committee’s Jan. 29 hearing, Shane indicated it was a foundation for the proposed legislation.

But the audit’s results only applied to 16% of students receiving free meals whose families qualified by applying for the program based on income, according to Heidi Zimmerman, a state auditor, who presented the audit to the House K-12 Education Budget Committee on Jan. 29. The nearly 80% of students who receive school meals through direct certification, or automatic enrollment because of participation in additional benefits programs, were not included in the audit’s scope.

Zimmerman said the overall accuracy of the free lunch count is very difficult for state auditors to assess.

“This is because decision-making related to the free lunch eligibility is dispersed across multiple state agencies and 285 school districts,” she said. “And, ultimately, much of the accuracy of the free lunch count depends on whether those state agencies and the school districts are accurately approving individuals for the various programs that they oversee.”

Shane’s modified bill passed out of committee Tuesday and will head to the Senate floor. It must also pass the House before reaching the governor’s desk for final approval.