As the week comes to an end, so are the guaranteed meals that Washoe County School District drained their savings to cover for the first month of the school year due to Joe Lombardo’s veto of Democrat-led legislation that would have guaranteed school meals for all Nevada students. Washoe County is using its savings – meant for support staff salaries and cafeteria improvements – to fill the void for hardworking families created by Lombardo’s veto. Come next week, this emergency program will end and students will no longer have guaranteed school meals.
Lombardo often passes the buck to the federal government to make up for his failure of leadership, but Lombardo’s veto bears a striking resemblance to the extremist provisions we see in his endorsed candidate Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda, which also wants to drastically curtail access to nutritious meals for students. Trump’s MAGA-Project 2025 agenda would completely eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision in the federal school food program that benefits hundreds of Nevada public schools:
- Project 2025’s Department of Education chapter characterizes school meal programs as “some of the most wasteful federal programs in Washington.” Joe Lombardo echoed this himself by lying about the guaranteed school meals program in Nevada being wasteful.
- The agenda criticizes the USDA nutrition programs that help feed millions of low-income Americans every year, including K-12 schoolchildren, and would further shrink federal support for universal school meal programs.
- The Republican Study Committee called for ending the CEP for high-poverty districts, which would end guaranteed school meals for tens of thousands of Nevada children currently receiving them and raise costs for working families.
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