[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Pages 23522-23523]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 STRENGTHENING CHILD NUTRITION PROGRAMS

  Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, the Senate has a special bipartisan 
tradition of support for child nutrition, and I am pleased to promote 
that tradition by joining with Senators Elizabeth Dole and Pat Roberts 
in cosponsoring S. 1549, which would expand children's access to the 
free school lunch and breakfast programs.
  This idea was first suggested to me by Senators Bob Dole and George

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McGovern at a conference last year at Dakota Wesleyan College in 
Mitchell, SD. Since our conversation, I have heard from a number of 
schools in South Dakota that many families whose children qualify for a 
reduced price lunch find it difficult to pay even the reduced fee. For 
some families, the fee can actually be an insurmountable barrier to 
participation.
  The main purpose of the school lunch program is to make sure that 
children have a reliable, nutritious lunch every day. If a lower income 
family can't afford to pay for a reduced price lunch, it follows that 
they will also struggle to afford to provide a bag lunch for their 
child.
  S. 1549 has strong support within my State. The South Dakota State 
Board of Education and more than two dozen local school boards have 
passed resolutions urging Congress to eliminate the reduced price 
school meal program.
  Expanding children's access to the free school lunch and breakfast 
programs would unquestionably help promote better child nutrition in 
America. I have cosponsored S. 1529 because I support that goal.
  I also support other equally important child nutrition and food 
program improvements. For example, lowering the area eligibility 
guideline in the summer and child care food programs from the current 
50 percent to 40 percent would provide services to more children in 
low-income communities. Increasing children's access to fresh fruits 
and vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy products, and lean meats 
are important steps in improving overall health and reducing obesity. 
Reducing the paperwork burden for participants in the Summer Food 
Program would help make sure more children have access to healthy food 
when school is not in session. Making for-profit child care centers 
that serve low-income children eligible to participate in the Child and 
Adult Care Food program, and additional improvements to other nutrition 
programs, including food stamps, are long overdue.
  Strengthening food support for low-income families is a sound 
investment in the long-term health and well-being of our children, and 
each of these initiatives is a worthy goal. Collectively, they are 
goals, I believe, a nation as great as the United States should strive 
to achieve. However, the current budgetary climate makes any of these 
investments extremely difficult.
  Just 2 years ago, record budget surpluses were projected that could 
have been used to fund this priority. Today, the nonpartisan 
Congressional Budget Office, CBO, projects massive deficits for many 
years to come, nearly 40 percent of which CBO attributes to the Bush 
tax cuts.
  The President chose to make tax cuts his economic priority, 
effectively at the expense of investments in our children. The 
Republican budget resolution, adopted earlier this year, made the same 
choice. It prioritized additional tax cuts, while providing no 
additional resources to the Senate Agriculture Committee for child 
nutrition or other improvements to food programs.
  Unless we can take steps to reorder the priorities in the federal 
budget, this means any costs resulting from improvements we might make 
in nutrition programs must be paid for by cutting the same programs or 
by increasing the deficit.
  The administration has proposed to require schools to increase their 
efforts to verify participating families' incomes which would have the 
result of generating budget savings. Sound reasonable? But the 
Department of Agriculture just released results from several new 
studies that show increasing income verification does virtually nothing 
to reduce errors but will significantly diminish participation by 
eligible children. The burden would be particularly acute for small, 
rural schools, like many in my state, that do not have the personnel to 
handle the increased paperwork. We clearly should not attempt to feed 
one group of children by forcing another group of eligible children out 
of the program.
  I support harmonizing the school meal income guidelines with the WIC 
income guidelines, as S. 1549 proposes. Under current circumstances, 
this may take some time to achieve. I will continue to work with my 
colleagues on a bipartisan basis to explore how we might make 
improvements in our nutrition programs, including advancing the goal of 
S. 1549. I encourage my colleagues to take a serious look at S. 1549 
and consider promoting this legislation as part of a comprehensive, 
long-term strategy to invest in important national nutritional 
priorities.

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