Erin Murphy and Maya Marchel Hoff in The Gazette:
Iowa announced on Monday that it will return to a federal summer food assistance program, while tying the program’s $40 per month per child to Iowa’s new healthy foods initiative.
The announcement came on the same day a report made available to The Gazette showed Iowa’s program in 2025 fell well short of reaching the number of children that the federal program would have.
Last summer’s Healthy Kids Iowa replacement program for Summer EBT required families to find time to locate and show up to distribution sites during limited hours and local pantries and other volunteers to set up, staff and market these pop-ups, which only had pre-packaged boxes of food, which is a lot to put on overburdened people and organizations.
It’s bad enough that, of the 220,000 Iowa children eligible, the replacement program managed to serve less than a third of them. What’s worse is that was exactly what the State of Iowa expected.