Rand Maker chats with Amy Trahan while she and her children, Angel, 7, center, Will, 11, left, and Lilly, 13, grab meals from Lulu the Lunch Wagon on July 17. Maker, who is the chief deputy of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, volunteers with Healthy Lincoln County, which runs the summer meals program. Each child gets two lunches and two breakfasts from the program, and volunteers drive around delivering meals four times a week. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

Maine was one of the first states to recognize that it just doesn’t make sense to have kids go hungry, with legislators voting in 2021 to provide free meals to all public school students, and schools and organizations throughout the state working to do the same over summer break and school vacations.

The positive impact – on students who used to worry about having enough to eat or being stigmatized for taking free lunch; on parents who struggled to make ends meet; and on teachers who have seen hungry students left behind – has been enormous.

That’s why it’s so frustrating to see these food programs falling short of their potential, largely because the rules, despite a lot of progress, remain more focused on trying to keep too many students from getting meals rather than making sure enough do.

Adding to the frustration is the fact that we all saw how community food programs can work when the stifling rules are loosened, only to see them tightened up again for no good reason. During the COVID pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funds and oversees federal meal programs aimed at students, allowed local programs run through schools and other organizations to offer grab-and-go and delivery options in addition to on-site meals.

It was seen as a way to reach students with school meals even while they were learning remotely from home, or on school vacation, making sure there were no gaps in a kid’s food security.

The flexibility meant that kids who live far from a meals site and have trouble with transportation, or whose parents have a working schedule that makes it difficult to get young kids to a site at meal time, could still get food to supplement what they had at home.

Students are now back in school, where in Maine they are all eligible for free school meals, thanks to the law passed in 2021.

But during summer vacation and other breaks, many students are out of luck.

Grab-and-go and delivery is now allowed at meal sites categorized as rural, but not those in urban areas. And even in a rural place like Maine, only 27 of the state’s 407 qualify. As a result, only 15% of the students who get free meals during the school year get them in the summer as well.

The first step is for federal rules to be changed to allow grab-and-go and delivery service at every site. Program directors in Maine say that one move could double participation.

Second, the meals program should stop using poverty rates to determine whether a location qualifies for a meal site. Because Maine students automatically qualify for free meals, many parents fail to fill out the application that helps local officials justify a new site.

However, Maine has the highest rate of child hunger in New England, with 1 in 5 kids not getting enough food.

There is no doubt that there are students and families in every part of Maine that struggle to get enough food, especially given the inflation following the pandemic. And there’s no doubt that every school could benefit from having a student body full of kids who are ready to learn every morning.

School meals programs and their summer offshoots have done great work in Maine. Since Maine passed the universal free school meals law, the number of students eating school meals has jumped 21%. Even with the challenges listed above, nearly 700,000 meals were given to kids in Maine last summer.

But by returning to the loosened rules we have all seen work, they could do even more, bringing more food to hungry kids, more certainty and stability to struggling families, and brighter times for our schools and communities.