Alaska teachers see sharp rise in student hunger after free school meal policy ends

A new study in Anchorage reveals that the end of universal free school meals has led to increased hunger, anxiety, and behavioural issues among elementary pupils, prompting calls to sustain free provision for health and equity reasons.

When the emergency policy that made school meals free for every child lapsed, some teachers in Anchorage said they began filling the gap themselves, keeping snacks on hand for pupils who arrived at afternoon lessons hungry, distracted and worried about lunch money. A new qualitative study of six elementary schools in Alaska says teachers associated the end of universal free school meals with more visible hunger, more anxiety over meal costs and a fall in the number of children eating school food.

Teachers told researchers that once families had to navigate charges and eligibility rules again, children were more likely to turn up with sugary drinks, snacks and other ultra-processed food, or with too little food at all. They also described poorer concentration, more behavioural difficulties and fewer pupils taking school meals, including some children staff believed should have qualified for free or reduced-price lunches.

The paper, published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, was based on online interviews with 25 kindergarten through sixth-grade teachers from six Anchorage schools. Those interviews were carried out in the winter and spring of 2023, asking teachers to compare the universal-meals school year of 2021-22 with 2022-23, after the federal pandemic-era policy had ended. Researchers analysed the transcripts using a qualitative method known as immersion/crystallisation and reported coding reliability of 0.82. The study is small, however, and it did not directly measure children’s food intake, food insecurity, anxiety, academic performance or behaviour, meaning it cannot prove that the policy change itself caused the differences teachers described. The teachers also volunteered to take part, and all six schools were involved in a broader school wellness initiative, which may limit how far the findings can be generalised.

What the teachers did describe with some consistency was a less fraught school day when meals were free to all. According to the study abstract, they believed hunger and family stress eased during the universal programme. Journal material accompanying the paper says teachers also thought universal provision reduced stigma around school meals and gave children a reliable fallback when they forgot lunch or had none from home. Several recalled that quieter or more self-conscious pupils no longer had to reveal that they were hungry in order to get fed.

The teachers were not entirely uncritical of the free-for-all approach. Some said it appeared to increase food waste, particularly when children accepted items they did not want. But they also described benefits that went beyond nutrition. Meals eaten in classrooms were said to help build stronger classroom communities, improve behaviour and create more opportunities for teachers and pupils to talk. About half of the teachers in the study supervised classroom meals rather than canteen meals, though many said that arrangement cost them planning or break time and left them dealing with spills, rubbish and clean-up.

After the programme ended, those advantages were overshadowed, in the teachers’ accounts, by worries about who was eating and who was not. Several reported that children asked about lunch balances or whether they had enough money for a meal; others simply stopped taking school food. Some teachers said they handed out food themselves when pupils seemed hungry. Deborah Olarte, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of nutrition at New York University, said: “Teachers witness firsthand how hunger affects students’ ability to learn, focus, and participate in the classroom.”

Olarte argued that administrative data alone cannot show how a policy change lands in a classroom. As she put it in comments released with the study: “Universal free school meals removed a worry from the school day. When they went away, the worry came back, and teachers watched it play out in their classrooms.” Elsevier’s journal release added that teachers identified no real benefits after the programme ended, even if some had seen more waste when meals were universally free.

The authors say those accounts bolster the case for keeping universal free school meals and for involving teachers more directly in the design of future programmes. The abstract frames the findings as evidence for sustained universal provision on health and equity grounds, while the journal material says teacher perspectives should be treated as a practical part of policymaking, not an afterthought. The open-access paper appeared online on 29 July ahead of the journal’s September issue and was funded by the US National Institutes of Health under grant R01HD107492.