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For the first time in five years, the majority of low-income students across Tennessee will not receive supplemental grocery funds this summer to help bridge the months when they aren’t receiving school meals.
Tennessee this week will send one-time $120 payments to an estimated 25,000 low-income students in 15 counties to help pay for summer grocery costs. Tennessee’s largest counties, include Shelby and Davidson, are excluded from the program.
The program is a significant rollback of Tennessee’s previous summer food benefits initiative, which served an estimated 700,000 students across the state each summer since 2020 with the help of a state-federal partnership.
That program, known as summer EBT or SUN Bucks, ended this year when Gov. Bill Lee declined to continue the partnership, effectively rejecting an estimated $75 million in federal funds that provided the summer grocery benefits.
Signe Anderson, senior director of nutrition advocacy at the Tennessee Justice Center, called the decision to discontinue the federal EBT program “devastating” for food insecure families.
“Tennessee’s decision to serve fewer than 25,000 children in just 15 counties leaves vulnerable families with fewer options at a time when hunger is on the rise for Tennessee families,” Anderson said. “We have already started hearing from families who will not have the support this summer.”
Though many Tennessee school systems have other summer feeding programs to reach students when class is out of session, advocates in the state argue the programs can be restrictive or inaccessible for families with scheduling conflicts or transportation issues.
In Memphis, for example, around 100 different sites are serving meals and snacks at some point in the summer. However, the sites offer a patchwork of availability, with hours varying by location and some offering only a few days of meals.
Other providers are more flexible, like the dozens of YMCA locations across the state offering meal packs for pick up with a week’s worth of breakfast and lunch food. Still, advocates raise concerns about rural families who may live miles from a meal location.
The decision to end the federal EBT program sparked heated pushback from a Tennessee congressman and child advocates earlier this year who argued the federal dollars were an important tool to address food insecurity, a particularly concerning issue during summer months when some students lose access to the regular meals provided during a school day.
Amid questions from lawmakers about giving up the federal funds, Lee’s office announced a new, state-funded program to provide payments to a limited number of counties, which the administration said were selected due to the lack of summer feeding partners like the YMCA.
Tennessee Department of Human Services Commissioner Clarence Carter has referred to the scaled-back state program as a “fiscally responsible” approach. Lee’s administration cited the state’s share of administrative costs as one reason to discontinue the state-federal partnership first launched under the Biden administration in 2020.
However, it’s now costing Tennessee $3 million to distribute benefits in 15 counties, while under the federal program Tennessee was responsible for around $5 million in administrative costs to serve 95 counties.
“This is cruel to Tennessee families and fiscally irresponsible when the state could have served 700,000 children for less money if they had run the federal S-EBT option,” Anderson said.
Melissa Brown is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact Melissa at mbrown@chalkbeat.org.
