Mackenzie Thomas
Staff Writer
Food insecurity, defined by the United States Department of Agriculture, is the uncertain availability of sustainable and nutritious foods within a household.
According to WyomingHealthMatters.org, the food insecurity rate in Laramie County is 10.9%, which is lower than both the state value of 12.3% and the country value of 12.5%.
Of this percentage, a large portion of those going hungry are school children. Many children within Wyoming are on free and reduced lunch plans, however, the percentage of students involved in these plans vary from school to school. In order to help these children, Wyoming State Senator Jeff Wasserburger has worked to propose a bill to help aid in feeding students.
“What the bill will do is allow school districts to, at the end of the day, after lunch has been served, if there is any surplus food to be thrown out, they can give it out to students instead of wasting it,” said Wasserburger.
This bill intends to provide some food for school students. It is not intended to provide food for entire families, but it can help struggling families by dividing up the food given to them in addition to meals.
Though school districts do not have to follow this bill, there are loose plans implemented in order to help students get the food they need while limiting the possible embarrassment of having to recieve help.
“One of the things they can do is have the cooks…bag up the surplus food and…wheel it into the guidance counselor’s office. [Then they can] give it to the kids who are food challenged at home. They can also bag up the food and take it to a soup kitchen if they chose, but districts don’t have to do this,” said Wasserburger.
Wasserburger used to work as the principal of Twin Spruce Junior High in Gillette, Wyoming. His experiences there shaped his ideas on forming this bill.
“As a building principal, I always regretted seeing us throw out perfectly good food, [but] it’s required by the federal government to do so. For many years I watched my cooks do this, and recently I saw in a publication where a school district was giving the extra food to students based off of a state law, and I thought why can’t Wyoming do that? Let’s see if we can,” Wasserburger said.
He then reached out to the Wyoming legislative office for research to see if it was possible to enact such a law. The legislative office deemed this possible based on their professional interpretation, and Wasserburger then worked to implement this idea into a bill.
While this is a newly proposed law, there are still challenges that could come about as school districts across Wyoming attempt to put this law into action. Wasserburger said the challenges are about to start during the upcoming legislative session. Overall, the bill has seen mostly optimistic reviews.
“I was speaking to a group of about five school boards about a month ago and they seemed positive about the bill,” said Wasserburger.
He added that he did not know exactly how schools will respond to this bill, but for the overall majority the review of this bill was positive.
This proposed bill will also work alongside Wyoming First Lady Jennie Gordon’s Wyoming Hunger Initiative. Gordon proposed this initiative once her husband, Mark Gordon, began working as the governor of Wyoming.
The Wyoming Hunger Initiative works with school districts, towns and communities to find a solution for each that will solve the problem of children going hungry. The bill proposed by Wasserburger could be a small step to help aid in the initiative.
“One of the best ways for university students to
be involved is to email their legislators. If the students are from Wyoming and
are involved or concerned in education or hunger issues, I’d ask them to email
their legislators and say they’d like to see this bill pass,” said
Wasserburger.
Small steps like this can help university students have a say in their government and help take steps towards solving the food insecurity issue many younger school students face.
