By: Safura Syed, Verite News – August 12, 2025
Increased restrictions on eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, introduced in President Donald Trump’s tax and spending law — known as the One Big Beautiful Bill — could put a universal free school meal program at risk for New Orleans public school students.
SNAP, previously known as food stamps, provides grocery benefits to low-income households, increasing access to healthy foods. But the program, which is administered at the federal level by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, also pays for in-school meals. Being enrolled in SNAP allows kids to automatically qualify for free school meals, reducing paperwork burdens for both school administrators and parents. Enrollment in other federal assistance programs, including Medicaid and Head Start, also directly qualify children for free meals.
The spending cuts to SNAP included in the bill, which Trump signed into law last month, are estimated to total $186 million over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Like the cuts to Medicaid included in the law, those savings are achieved through administrative adjustments — which will likely result in lower enrollment — rather than direct funding cuts to the program.
Changes to program eligibility — such as increased work requirements and restrictions on noncitizen enrollment — will result in fewer adults and children enrolled in the program, according to Erin Hysom, a senior child and nutrition policy analyst with the Food Research and Action Center.
“SNAP provides a direct link between eligible children and free school meals,” Hysom said. “Cutting SNAP severs that link, resulting in increased paperwork burdens on schools and families and ultimately causing eligible children to fall through the cracks.”
Lower enrollment could jeopardize schools’ ability to participate in a government-funded universal free meal program, called the Community Eligibility Provision, in which the vast majority of schools across the state and in the city of New Orleans now participate.
Under the Community Eligibility Provision, when a certain percentage of low-income students directly qualify for free meals, all students at a school can enjoy free breakfast and lunch without being enrolled in SNAP themselves. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP and other nutrition programs, lowered the percentage of students needed to qualify for the Community Eligibility Provision from 40% to 25%. The rule took effect during the 2024-2025 school year, resulting in a surge of participating districts, according to a report to the Food Research and Action Center, which found that about 27.2 million students attended a participating school last school year, up 3.6 million from the year before.
Around 22% of New Orleans residents receive SNAP benefits. But over 90% of New Orleans public schools participate in the Community Eligibility Provision, the Food Research and Action Center found. In all but one of the participating schools, over 50% of students qualify for free lunches. But as cuts to Medicaid and SNAP are expected to take place over the next few years, that percentage of students might decrease, threatening all students’ automatic access to free meals.
Hysom said that the potential loss of free meal programs in schools will lead to increased stigma, higher school meal debt and more hunger in classrooms that lowers learning outcomes.
“We like to say that community eligibility creates hunger-free schools because CEP reduces the stigma that is often present in cafeterias when we categorize children by their household income,” Hysom said.
Brenda Watson, the business manager and director of food service at Fannie C. Williams Charter School in New Orleans East, which is enrolled for Community Eligibility Provision benefits, agreed. Last school year, 85% of the school’s students were on SNAP, Watson said.
“Most of the kids are thinking about survival,” Watson said. “This may be the best meal that they would get for that day. And so we try to recognize those kids. So just imagine if you’re asking them to pay, and they were already on SNAP, and food stamps. They don’t have money to pay, so you’re going to cut off everything that they have.”
Watson said she is concerned about cuts to federal programs that she learns about through the news, but that the state hasn’t passed down any information about cuts to SNAP specifically. She said the school relies on the state to transfer information about how federal grants will affect schools to administrators.
Danyelle Christmas, a parent from the Lower 9th Ward, received SNAP benefits for most of her childhood, and was again briefly enrolled in the program last year. (Christmas is currently running for the District E seat on the New Orleans City Council in the fall municipal elections.) She said the benefits she received helped keep her family afloat as her weekly grocery bills reached $150. Even though she doesn’t receive SNAP benefits anymore, Christmas said that free meals at her children’s daycare help ease burdens at home.
“So if funding is cut for the daycare, then now I may have to wake up early at 4:30 in the morning, and I’ll prepare breakfast, and it’s more draining on the parent and the household,” Christmas said. “So it trickles down in every which way possible, affecting everybody.”
This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
