Seattle Public Schools students will have to wait another year for universal free school meals.
At a nearly four-hour committee meeting today, the Seattle City Council voted 6 to 3 for an amendment that delays Mayor Katie Wilson’s universal school meals program until the 2027 school year to fund a new, means-tested voucher program to feed thousands of low-income kids on weekends and over school breaks for the next six years.
The vote is a blow to Mayor Wilson, who had planned to fund universal free school meals using the $1.3 billion Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy.
Council President Joy Hollingsworth and Councilmember Dionne Foster were the original sponsors of the amendment, which they say would be a more equitable way to address food insecurity. Libraries, Education & Neighborhoods committee chair Maritza Rivera also added herself as a sponsor ahead of the vote. Council members Bob Kettle, Dan Strauss, and Debora Juarez also voted for it. Council members Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Eddie Lin, and Rob Saka voted against the amendment.
The mayor’s office had argued that universal school meals would help out more than 6,800 students whose family income barely exceeds federal thresholds. But Hollingsworth and Foster said equity should come first with additional aid to Seattle’s poorest youth. The question of whether to siphon off funds from one food program to another started a bitter zero-sum debate between proponents of means testing and universalism.
The vote did not fall neatly along progressive and centrist lines. Foster, a sponsor, is one of the council’s three progressives, while the centrist Saka gave an impassioned speech about how his childhood experiences motivated him to oppose any delay.
“We qualified for free and reduced lunch, which means we also would have likely qualified for Medicaid,” Saka said. “But I never went to the dentist and only went to the doctor a handful of times in nine years because of the severe, significant, non-trivial, and substantial administrative paperwork burden imposed on people that need these valuable resources.”
In a press statement, Wilson pledged to work closely with the council and city departments to implement the programs funded by the FEPP levy.
“While I am disappointed with the decision to delay universal meals for a full school year, I respect the Council’s process and know we share a commitment to addressing food insecurity,” Wilson said.
At the meeting, Foster argued the new voucher program would not be means tested. But Seattle’s teacher union came out against the amendment because school staff would have to choose which kids deserve the additional food aid. Deciding which students get the vouchers is by definition means testing, even if no formal income criteria is used.
“The intent has never been to undermine universal school meals,” Foster said. “It has been to prioritize kids who are reliant on those meals for food access and ensure there are additional dollars for those young people during out-of-school times and weekends.”
During public comment, several SPS high schoolers argued against the amendment, with one saying she had seen classmates go hungry because they couldn’t afford lunch. SPS teacher Alaina McCallum said that universal school meals would establish a safety net for all kids.
Nonprofit heads from the Community Day Center for Children and Africatown Community Land Trust and several leaders of Seattle’s Black community, including Elmore Dixon, who co-founded the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party and helped start the its free breakfast program in 1969, supported Hollingsworth and Foster’s amendment because it put the neediest kids first.
“It would have been ludicrous for us to take the breakfast program out to Laurelhurst,” Dixon said.
Prior to the vote, Rinck pointed out the price tags on both the food voucher program ($3 million over six years) and universal school meals ($3.6 million per year) were small compared with what the city was willing to spend on a graffiti abatement plan (a projected at least $3.5 million this year), the homeless sweeping Unified Care Team ($33.6 million a year), or on police surveillance cameras (the City is expected to spend $4.9 million on the Real Time Crime Center this year).
“Now if the option before was to fund this weekend and break meals program using another fund source outside this levy … I would support it in a heartbeat,” Rinck said. “But to take it out of our universal school meals expansion is a tradeoff I can’t support today.”
The contentious debate over this one amendment could be a preview of this fall’s budget season. The City predicts a significant loss in revenue due to the poor state of the economy and high inflation. Departments across the board could see cuts, and popular services may be on the chopping block.
The council will vote on the final FEPP levy implementation plan next Tuesday, July 28.
