According to the NY Times,  NYC Public School Chancellor Carmen Fariña confirmed Wednesday that lunch will be available free of charge to all 1.1 million students beginning this school year. 

“This is about equity,” Ms. Fariña said. “All communities matter.”

This initiative has been a work in progress by food-policy advocates and many members of the New York City Council, who said that some students would prefer to go hungry rather than admit they cannot afford to pay for lunch. Nationally, many students are left with a lunch debt if they are unable to pay for their lunch. 

In reality, the majority of NYC public school students are poor. Already, 75 percent of them qualified for free or reduced-price lunches. Officials added that in New York City, those who qualified for the lower cost received it for free, as well. Still, the new initiative will reach an additional 200,000 students and save their families about $300 per year seeing that the full price for a school lunch is $1.75 per day.

City officials said the program was not expected to cost the city more money. Breakfast had already been free systemwide, and the city’s stand-alone middle schools had a universal free-lunch pilot in place since 2014 that fed an additional 10,000 children who would not necessarily have qualified for free or discounted lunches. 

New York City joins other major cities including Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Dallas in offering free lunch to their students. However, New York has far more schoolchildren to feed than any of those cities.

This is amazing, one thing that students should never be shamed for is their need for food vs. the amount of money they have. Hopefully, we will see even more cities following suit.