At those schools, all students get free breakfast and lunch, regardless of their family’s income. “We’ve done a lot of good things to feed kids here in Butte,” Mr. Marthaller said. But introducing universal free meals, he added, was “probably the best thing we ever did.”Advocates for free school meals have pushed for them to be offered to every student for a long time, but saw significant progress in the last decade and a half. Their first big win came quietly, in 2010, when Congress passed an under-the-radar policy called the community eligibility provision, which made it easier for schools to serve free meals to all. Then, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government let every public school student eat for free, rapidly transforming the nation’s thinking around school meals.

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Persons: Kurt Marthaller, fuming, “, ” Mr, Marthaller Locations: Butte, Mont