Lesson Plan: How the Federal School Lunch Program Became a Spicy Political Debate
Grades 9-12
The federal school lunch program serves nearly 5 billion meals annually, with benefits for the health and academic performance of the 29 million students who take part. Retro Report traces the transformation of the program from a 1946 initiative addressing malnutrition into an effort caught up in debates about everything from the federal deficit to teenage obesity to government intervention in people’s lives. Students will explore federal and state school lunch policies beginning with the Reagan administration’s cuts to the national school lunch program through to state-level efforts to expand free lunch access. Students will use their knowledge to build policy posters about school lunch access.
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