P-EBT food benefits helped narrow the hunger gap during the pandemic. This school year, some families who relied on the program are now being excluded.

When Lisa Brewer decided last July to enroll her children in virtual learning for the 2021-2022 academic year, she did so to prioritize the health and well-being of her family. The vaccine had only been approved for adults at that point. Brewer was worried that a single Covid-19 exposure among her four children could put the entire family at risk of getting sick.

Brewer and her husband live in a mobile home in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her elderly parents, one of whom has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, an inflammatory lung condition. The home is a small space, and the kids don’t have bedrooms. So when her local public school district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, announced it would be launching a first-of-its-kind, fully virtual school for families who weren’t comfortable returning to in-person instruction in the fall, Brewer was happy to sign them up.

What Brewer didn’t realize is that doing so meant forgoing sorely-needed breakfast and lunch money for her kids.

During the previous school year, Brewer’s family had been automatically eligible for a Covid-19 hunger aid initiative called Pandemic-EBT (P-EBT), which was first authorized in March 2020 through the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. The program was supposed to be a simple solution to a big challenge: When the pandemic shut down schools, students across the country lost a crucial weekday source of food. P-EBT provided pre-loaded debit cards to families whose kids would have otherwise received free or reduced-price school meals as a way to reimburse them for the costs of those missed breakfasts and lunches.

“It meant everything,” Brewer said of P-EBT. She even received the payments on her regular Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) card, making them a straightforward boost to her monthly grocery budget. “The kids are home 24 hours a day. They’re eating their breakfast, their lunch and snacks, and everything at home. When we did get P-EBT, it was a godsend.”

But Brewer got a rude awakening this month, when the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services started issuing P-EBT payments for meals missed between September and December of the 2021-2022 school year: She discovered that her kids no longer qualified for the funds.

Read the full article about qualifying for school lunch by Jessica Fu at The Counter.