Improving Nutrition for America’s Children Act
August 25, 2010
The House Education and Labor Committee passed H.R. 5504, the Improving Nutrition for America’s Children Act, with a bipartisan vote of 32-13. The legislation supports children’s health and reduces childhood hunger by increasing access to, and improving the quality of, federal child nutrition programs. That bipartisan bill reauthorizes the WIC Program (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) and Child Nutrition programs and provides increased investments of approximately $8 billion over 10 years (official cost estimates are still pending from the Congressional Budget Office ).
H.R. 5504 provides substantial and positive new investments in child nutrition programs that will provide low-income children with access to healthy, nutritious food. The bill supports improvements to direct certification for school meals; provides competitive grant funds to promote School Breakfast Program expansion; creates new paperless options for universal school meals; enhances Summer Food Service Program availability by allowing Summer Food sponsors to serve all children at sites in rural areas where at least 40 percent of the children qualify for free or reduced-price school meals (currently, the eligibility test for all areas is 50 percent); creates state pilots that make it easier for community-based organizations to provide meals to children after school, on weekends and during school holidays; creates pilots for schools to operate the afterschool meal program though the National School Lunch Program; allows childcare providers in more states to receive federal reimbursement for serving an additional meal or snack for children who are in childcare for more than eight hours per day; and enhances the nutritional quality of food served in school-based and preschool settings.
Urge Members of Congress to support H.R. 5504 and Chairman George Miller’s continued efforts to provide substantial and positive new investments in federal child nutrition programs as reauthorization progresses in the House.
