While some states are wrapping up their summer food assistance programs for this year, Missouri is still providing last year’s rewards to children. The state also denied tens of millions of dollars in federal aid for low-income children, owing to officials’ lack of faith in their ability to distribute such benefits by the deadline.
Even as most low-income families in the country receive government food assistance for the summer, thousands of Missouri families are still waiting for last season’s benefits.
Mallory McGowin, spokesman for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said in an email to The Independent this week that Missouri still needs to distribute food benefits to about 177,000 children under a federal program designed to help pay expenditures from last summer.
According to McGowin, the state has provided payments to almost 317,000 children thus far.
Administrative difficulties have plagued the program for at least the last year, according to officials: The delayed advantages even influenced Missouri’s decision not to participate in this year‘s iteration of the program last month. The state turned down tens of millions of dollars in federal aid, in part because authorities were unsure they could distribute the funds by the Sept. 30 deadline.
And the problems with last summer’s benefits are still being worked out, with many still waiting for assistance.
The Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer program, or P-EBT, is a federal COVID relief program administered by states that has been in operation in various forms since 2020 to provide extra food for children, with monies put onto cards and utilized in the same way that food stamps are.
The 2022 summer program gave $391 in food to any child who qualified for free or reduced lunch during the 2021-2022 school year, as well as children under the age of six who qualified for the federal food assistance program SNAP. The education department of the state determines program eligibility, while the social services department issues benefit cards.
When the education department has finished processing benefits for school-aged children, it will begin processing benefits for children under the age of six.
According to McGowin, around 19,000 students’ entitlements have still to be processed. The state previously predicted that 454,000 pupils would get benefits, rather than the current estimate of approximately 336,000. McGowin stated earlier this summer that the gap is due to the eligibility data supplied by institutions to the state.
And an estimated 158,000 children under the age of six are eligible.
“[The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education] and [the Department of Social Services] continue to work as quickly as possible to distribute P-EBT benefits,” McGowin said when asked when the state intends to finish disbursing benefits.
“Funding for the program must be distributed by the end of 2023.”
Administrative issues
The state’s education department has mostly highlighted administrative barriers to benefit distribution, which has necessitated coordination among the state’s 517 public school districts, the education department, and the social services department.
National experts and advocates have raised concerns about a probable lack of enough staffing and system capabilities to distribute the benefits. Other states had administrative hurdles in distributing payments over the summer last year, but most did so only a few months later.
Before Missouri began distributing summer benefits, it granted school-year P-EBT for 2021-2022 for children with COVID-related absences, which were not being tracked by all schools and required extensive data collecting.
It was also necessary to build a data portal from the ground up in order to collect student eligibility information from schools and communicate it with the education department, followed by the social services department. Some states have already began distributing benefits when the state signed a contract with a firm to develop the portal in August 2022.
The agency needed to collect eligibility information about students in a new format and publish it across platforms that didn’t necessarily share the same format.
Missouri was one of the last states to begin disbursing summer 2022 payments in June 2023. (Two states, South Dakota and Alaska, did not have approved plans to distribute P-EBT during the summer of 2022.)
‘The kids have been hungry’
Megan Bessenbacher, a Cass County single mother with three qualified children, said she has been inquiring with the state and her children’s schools about last year’s help for nearly a year.
Her six-year-old daughter received the $391 benefit in June, and her fourteen-year-old daughter earned it last month. However, her four-year-old has yet to get it because the state has not yet began processing benefits for children under the age of six.
Bessenbacher also stated that she is awaiting approximately $120 in school-year P-EBT benefits for the 2021-2022 school year. COVID absence payments range from $21 to $120 every day missed during the school year.
By late May, the majority of school-year payments had been distributed, according to McGowin, and the state began processing summer benefits. Despite the fact that Bessenbacher’s 14-year-old daughter missed approximately four weeks of school due to COVID during the 2021-2022 school year, she has not earned the $120 benefit.
The whole $511 in benefits she is awaiting would nearly treble her monthly SNAP payment — while she claims that all of the assistance would have been useful closer to last year, when it was intended to cover.
“During winter, spring, and summer break…the kids were hungry,” Bessenbacher said, referring to times when they didn’t get free school breakfasts and lunches, which summer P-EBT was intended to help with.
Even during the school year, Bessenbacher has difficulty putting food on the table, owing to increased food prices. She frequently eats less in order to feed her children.
“I only eat once a day, despite being hungry much more often,” she explained.
Bessenbacher stated that she is unable to work due to disability and is awaiting disability benefits, therefore the family is without income. She and her children live with her parents, which she describes as a “blessing,” but she believes that “with all they do, they shouldn’t be providing meals, too.”
With a budget that limits the nutritious items she can afford — her kids, in particular, enjoy fresh fruit — and her youngest child’s intolerance to certain foods, Bessenbacher said, “it ends up with me feeling like a failure as a parent at nearly every meal.”
During a year when her children sorely needed it, the aid was in sight but just out of grasp, she claimed.
“It’s heartbreaking to know that there are benefits available to help our children while watching my children want more,” Bessenbacher said. “It’s heartbreaking to know that more benefits for this summer have been completely turned down.”
Megan Bessenbacher is a single mother of three children.
Jeanie Honey, a mother of two children who qualify in Springfield, is concerned that her payments from last summer may never arrive.
Honey’s children are school-age, thus they are among the approximately 19,000 people currently waiting: She is more concerned that her children have been ignored as time passes.
The pace of benefits disbursal and communication, she said, has stood in sharp contrast to other interactions she has with state government: “There was no issues with increasing my property taxes and property evaluations and keeping on track with making sure I paid them,” she said.
“Here was a lifeline and it was totally messed up and delayed.”
The benefits she is owed for last summer amount to $782.
“I think the state has been in complete denial of how things are for Missouri residents that live paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “I cannot even imagine how it is for those who don’t have a job.”
Permanent program on the horizon
Missouri voted last month not to participate in this summer’s iteration of the program, foregoing tens of millions of dollars in federal funding.
The difficulties in administering P-EBT were a major factor in the decision not to participate.
This decision placed Missouri different from the 43 other states and Washington, D.C. that were permitted to run a Pandemic EBT program in the summer of 2023. (Many of these states, including Tennessee and Oklahoma, began issuing benefits this summer.)
Beginning next year, the federal government will make the Summer EBT program permanent, providing $40 in benefits every month of summer vacation. States can decide whether or not to participate.
Last month, McGowin stated that the state will “focus on implementing the system changes necessary to facilitate participation in summer EBT programs in future years.”
However, in order for Missouri to participate in next year’s program, “the state’s data collection systems must be addressed well in advance,” according to McGowin.