by Carly Rothman

A key U.S. Senate Committee passed an important bill last week for Child Nutrition Reauthorization, the measure authorizing all of the federal school meal and child nutrition programs.

Called the "Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act," the bill includes promising recommendations for Child Nutrition Reauthorization, including provisions for Universal School Meals and the expansion of direct certification for free school meals to children in foster care or on Medicaid.

And yet the bill would significantly underfund Child Nutrition Reauthorization, budgeting less than half the $10 billion called for by President Obama.

Adding insult to injury, the bill would offset this new funding by slashing $1.2 billion from the nutrition education component of the federal food stamp program (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP) over the next decade, handicapping nutrition education programs for low-income children, teens and adults nationwide.

With obesity and diet-related disease at a crisis level in many low-income neighborhoods, adequate school meals and nutrition education programs are vital to ensuring children receive both adequate nutrition and the knowledge and skills for moving toward a healthy lifestyle.

Underfunding the programs that feed our nation’s most high-need students guarantees that they will not be successful. And cannibalizing funds from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program–Education (SNAP-Ed) would undermine federal priorities to end child hunger by 2015, prevent childhood obesity and promote child nutrition — the very purpose of the bill itself.

Moreover, the bill would disproportionately hurt New York by freezing SNAP-Ed funding at its current levels, which currently provide New York with about ¼ the funding per person as California, despite the fact that it is home to nearly as many food stamp recipients.

In this respect, the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act” robs Peter to pay Paul. Our legislators must adequately fund Child Nutrition Reauthorization without undermining programs that already serve the people they seek to help.

Visit our advocacy page to help send the message to our legislators in D.C.