By DANA TIMS/YachatsNews.com
The families of thousands of Lincoln County students are beginning to receive payments compensating them for school-provided meals they missed over the past year to due pandemic-caused school closures.
Three separate payments will cover school lunches students would normally have received last October, November and December.
“We should see just over 5,000 individual students receive benefits,” Jamie Nicholson, the Lincoln County School District’s child nutrition program manager, wrote in response to questions from YachatsNews.
Based on current estimates, Nicholson added, a more than $3.3 million will be allocated to Lincoln County alone over the next three months. That amounts to a huge boost in a county where hunger and poverty rates remain significantly above Oregon’s statewide average.
The influx of money from two state agencies comes at a key moment for many families since Lincoln County is one of the many in Oregon under the federal “community eligibility’ school meals rule. To qualify, a school must have at least 40 percent of its students in various state programs. If it does, every district student is eligible for free meals that don’t require families to fill out school meal-related paperwork.
Fully 80 percent of Lincoln County’s students quality for free and reduced-price meal eligibility, according to state figures. That compares with only 52 percent of students statewide.
Countywide, 88 percent of eligible schools participate in the Community Eligibility Provision, which provides no-cost meals to all district students regardless of income. Statewide, that figure drops to 51 percent.
Payments up to $136 a month
Under the new reimbursement program, payments of up to $136 for each of those three months will come to families whose children – so-called ‘distance learners’ — attended classes entirely on a remote basis.
Families of students who were ‘hybrid learners’ – those whose schools provided a combination of in-person and distance learning – will receive $75 a month.
Payments will come to families in several forms, with most of the money being added on to existing or new Oregon Trail Cards.
Children enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will see the additional money loaded onto their parents’ Oregon Trail cards. Those cards effectively function the same as any other debit card.
Some families may see benefits start to appear on previously issued SNAP cards as soon as this week, according to Kristin Bigler, the district’s communications specialist. The Oregon Department of Human Services, however, is still working on processing the majority of district families, meaning payments, if not already in hand, will still be expected to start showing up shortly.
Non-SNAP households will receive a new card in the mail if they do not currently have a Pandemic Benefits Transfer card. Benefits will be issued on Oregon EBT cards – also known as Oregon Trail cards — and mailed to the address on file with the school for students who do not receive SNAP.
Hundreds of thousands of other students across the state are receiving similar benefits, which are intended to compensate families for the meals students missed out on during the past year.
Payments are not based on the respective incomes of individual families, Bigler said in a news release. Instead, all enrolled students in the Lincoln County School District quality for the benefit because of the district’s participation in the National School Lunch Program. That program’s Community Eligibility Provision provides no-cost meals to all district students regardless of income.
The sole proviso is that students just need to have been enrolled in a district school between the months of October 2020 and May 2021.
Items that can be purchased with the cards include fruits and vegetables; meat, poultry and fish; dairy products; breads and cereals; other foods such as snack foods and non-alcoholic beverages; and, seeds and plans that produce food for the house to eat.
Students can also still get “grab-and-go” or summer meals each weekday from their school while receiving new supplemental benefits.
The new program comes on top of a number of other district initiatives aimed at keeping students fed. Those include:
- Offering free breakfast and lunch on school days to all enrolled students, including on-campus pre-kindergartens;
- Free after-school snack or suppers, served at the district’s onsite after school programs, recreations and housing club houses;
- A Fresh Fruit & Vegetable program, which provides a fresh snack daily to all K-8 students;
- Free breakfast and lunch, and sometimes snacks and suppers on non-school week- days;
- and, the Farm to School initiative, which provides money to purchase local items such as berries, cheese and scratch-made scones.