In Logan, a student athlete said he often scavenged pizza from a dumpster. In West Valley City, a student who lived in a car said she had no way to cook food like mac and cheese that her family got from a food bank. In the Granite School District, a social worker described the academic decline of a student who is often hungry because of financial difficulties.

Utah is still far from establishing a universal free lunch program in public schools. However, lawmakers approved a first step to expand who gets to access meals at no cost this year with HB100, a bill Gov. Spencer Cox ceremoniously signed on Tuesday.

“This bill and what it accomplishes isn’t just about providing school lunch, it’s about helping kids learn, and kids can’t learn when they’re hungry,” Cox said on Tuesday. “So we appreciate those hardworking class families who do so much to take care of their kids, and we know that this can alleviate just one more of those burdens for those that are struggling the most.”

The legislation allows those who qualify for reduced-cost meals to access the free lunch program in Utah, approving a one-time payment of $2.5 million to support the program.

The bill also prohibits schools from publicly identifying or stigmatizing a student unable to pay for a meal, or from requiring them to perform chores to make up for the cost. Additionally, it provides students longer lunch breaks to avoid food waste, and allows unopened food to be returned for redistribution.

Currently, students in households with incomes at or below 130% of federal poverty levels qualify for federal free school meals. With Utah’s legislation that will become effective on July 1, those in the state with incomes between 130% and 185% of the poverty level, who could previously only access reduced meal fees, would be eligible for free lunches.

Overall, it would benefit about 40,000 Utah children.

The food insecurity issue was well known in the state, but it received special attention when FOX13 revealed that the combined school lunch debt in Utah was about $1.7 million in 2023. That number grew to $2.8 million in 2024.

While no one is denied a meal in schools, according to FOX13, the debt may follow students throughout their school years, and may forbid them from walking in their graduation.

Last year, Cox redirected $1.2 million in federal COVID-19 relief to start a grant program to address the debt. However, he said on Tuesday, up until now there wasn’t a permanent solution to the issue.

It wasn’t the first time the bill sponsor, Rep. Tyler Clancy, R-Provo, proposed legislation like HB100. In 2024, a request for $4 million in appropriations to expand the school lunch program failed to make it to the state’s budget.

“This bill, while exciting in many ways, just shows that the process does work. Shows that when people come together who are really unified on a key issue, like Gov. Cox said, that hungry kids cannot learn in the classroom, and we’re spending $7 billion on education. Well, let’s do something about that,” Clancy said on Tuesday. “And that’s how this bill came to be.”

In Utah, 1 in 6 children face food insecurity, Clancy told the Senate Education Committee in March. All of them are from working families that don’t qualify for assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often known as food stamps, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).

After the signing ceremony Emily Bell McCormick, president of the Policy Project, a nonprofit that promotes solution-based policies in the state and supported the legislation, described passing the bill as “a battle,” but she was glad to finally see it come to fruition.

“We all understand the burden that’s on us when it comes to this, especially with rising housing costs and the cost of living being more expensive here in the state of Utah,” she said. “Spending $12 a day on a school lunch if you have three or four kids, it’s pretty difficult. It’s difficult for those families who barely make ends meet.”

It was a challenge to find ways for the state to pay for school lunches in an efficient manner, Bell McCormick said. However, the bill authors were able to identify those who aren’t getting any other assistance, and may be stuck working multiple jobs to sustain their families.

“When we looked at that, and then you look at how much we spend on education, billions of dollars (…) and the cost of this is less than $3 million,” she said. “And so it really increases a child’s chance of learning.”

Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.