TALLAHASSEE — Florida House Democrats are making a last-ditch effort to convince the DeSantis administration to sign up for $256 million in summer lunches for poor kids next year before Thursday’s deadline.
They sent a letter to Gov. Ron DeSantis, Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson and Shevaun Harris, secretary for the Florida Department of Children and Families, late Tuesday urging them to notify the federal government that they intend to apply to the program.
State officials passed up millions of dollars in new federal food assistance money this summer. They have consistently said they have more than enough programs to feed Florida’s hungry children and that the federal program had unwelcome “strings” attached.
But advocates for children and the hungry say one in five children in Florida go hungry during the summer because their families cannot afford enough groceries to make up for the free meals they got at school during the academic year.
“Florida has an opportunity to correct the egregious error made by DeSantis in 2024 when he decided to politicize food insecurity,” House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell of Tampa said in a news release. “Floridians have had to suffer through political stunt after political stunt by this governor while they’re trying to address their affordability crisis.”
Florida was one of 13 states that decided not to participate in the 2024 summer program, called SUN Bucks, missing out on sharing $2.6 billion in federal food assistance benefits, House Democrats said in the letter.
The governor’s office and the department of children and families, which ran similar programs during the COVID-19 pandemic, did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment about the letter.
SUN Bucks is a new program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which also runs the federal school lunch program.
The state would have had to put up $13 million, or half the administrative costs, to make SUN Bucks available to 2.1 million children this summer. The program would have provided families $120 per child to spend on groceries at local stores when schools were out of session. Democrats estimated the program would have had a $466 million economic impact on the state.
Fewer than 10% of the 672,324 elementary school children in Florida who get free or reduced-price lunches during the school year receive a summer lunch, according to a report by the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit organization working to end poverty-related hunger.
“Summer always means more demand as low-income families with very tight budgets absorb the extra financial hit of one or more children eating at home,” Greg Higgerson, chief development officer for Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida, said last month.
