1 in 4 AZ kids relies on SNAP. State's dismal childhood poverty record leading to a perfect storm

As the federal shutdown drags on, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food benefits recipients remain in limbo. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to release contingency funds to pay the benefits, but then, the president himself posted on social media that he would withhold the benefits until the shutdown ends — despite and in violation of multiple court orders.

Politics

Trump administration ordered to restore full SNAP benefits by Friday

Jennifer Ludden

In failing to fully fund the food assistance program that covers 42 million low-income Americans, the judge said the government "failed to consider the harms" to people who rely on the benefits.

The White House seemed to contradict that, but even if the administration pays the benefits to the millions of Americans who rely on them to eat, though, there will likely be a delay, and folks probably won’t get all of the money they’re used to.

But, as pundits debate the merits of safety net programs like this — and accuse folks of milking the system — Shantel Meek wants folks to remember one thing: A big chunk of the people who benefit from SNAP are kids.

Meek is the executive director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University. She joined The Show and said cuts to SNAP and early childhood education programs like Head Start will hit Arizona children hard, especially because we are starting from so far behind.

Full conversation

SHANTEL MEEK: One in 4 kids in Arizona rely on SNAP benefits. I think 40% of SNAP funding in Arizona goes to feeding children. We have disabled folks, elderly folks, veterans, a whole number of other categories as well. And it is the most basic need, right? It is food. And so, of course, childhood hunger is associated with a whole range of outcomes in health and education and all sorts of things. Because you can imagine if you're hungry, right, that impacts your health, that impacts the extent to which you're able to focus or do anything else.

LAUREN GILGER: So, basic need; a whole lot of kids in Arizona are going to be impacted by this. One of the ways they might make up for that, right, is eating at school. ... But we're also looking at potential cuts to — and some cuts already in place in our state — to Head Start, due to this federal shutdown.

MEEK: Right. Just like school-age kids rely on school lunch in the K-12 space, young children who are living in poverty rely on Head Start for meals. Head Start provides nutritious breakfast, nutritious lunches and nourishment for kids as part of the program. And so we are also seeing potential risk there, right? I think In Arizona, about 23% of our preschoolers who are living in poverty attend Head Start programs.

And so that's a really big chunk of our kids living in poverty who ... if we don't have SNAP, right, there's going to be impact for food on the table at home if they don't have Head Start, that doubly impacts their access to nutrition and food.

GILGER: So that's the potential impact of just even brief pauses to funding for Head Start, for SNAP. We didn't even get to Medicaid yet, which is facing cuts in the future as well. But let's back up for a moment, Shantel, and just talk about where Arizona's starting place was. How does Arizona compare nationally in terms of child poverty and the, kind of, various impacts of that?

MEEK: Yeah. So Arizona's child poverty rate right now is about 15%, which is pretty similar to the national average. That's still about 228,000 — or a quarter of a million — kids in poverty in our state. The Annie E. Casey Foundation ranks states on child well being, and what they found when they published their most recent report earlier this year was that Arizona was unfortunately ranked 42nd in child well being.

GILGER: Yeah. I mean, give us a sense of where these kinds of cuts intersect with that already, kind of, bad starting point, right? Like, what kind of perfect storm are we looking at?

MEEK: ... To start at a national level, just real quick, this organization called Children's Focus does an analysis of the federal budget every year and they look at the percent of the budget that goes to kids and programs that serve kids. They just published their recent one last week, and about 8.87% of the federal budget goes toward kids' stuff.

Kids make up about 22% of the population, for reference — so that's already low, right? As a country, we're not doing a great job. In Arizona, we're doing worse. And we're below the average in a lot of different areas. So if we think about education, for example, this isn't a secret: the state is ranked 49th in investing in education.

We're almost the worst state in the nation in high school graduation, with the exception of New Mexico. If we think about early education, only about 3% of kids in the state are served by state funded pre-K. We rank about 44th in that domain.

... We talked about Head Start already, but there are states that invest directly in Head Start to boost the number of their kids in poverty in the state who are receiving that kind of service. But we don't do that.

So we can go on and on. ... But across many of these domains — education, childcare, early education, health insurance coverage, healthcare, cash assistance and socioeconomic stability — we're just starting from behind and have a lot of ground to make up to even get to the national average. And then you layer on top all the federal stuff coming down where we're not in a great place.

GILGER: So during this shutdown, as we're looking at these cuts, even if they're temporary, what communities might be impacted most? Like, I'm imagining tribal lands, rural Arizona, you know, probably has a lot more kids who benefit from these programs.

MEEK: Yeah, absolutely. We actually looked at this data recently and found that Head Start plays a major role in early education in rural communities. In some counties, Head Start makes up 60%, 70% in one county, upwards of 90% of the available child care slots for families. So if Head Start goes away, the bottom falls out, right? Especially in our rural communities.

GILGER: I want to ask you a little bit about your thoughts on why this is, that Arizona is at this place when it comes to kids and childhood poverty issues? I mean, is this really about money, about funding, about funding choices? Or is this, you think, something deeper about, like the way people here regard children, vulnerable communities in general?

MEEK: I wish I knew the answer to that. You know, as I started with a little bit earlier, this is — of course, like we don't do enough. We don't prioritize kids in budgets or in policy at the federal level. Many of those safety net programs that we've talked about, those basic need programs, have never been fully funded to serve all kids, including Head Start.

But at the state, I think we have just had a really hard last couple decades. You know, we definitely saw some dips during the recession in the '08 and '09 period. And a lot of it has been, you know, as we've recovered from that as a country and as a state, like come out of that recession, we just never put the money back, or increased the money or kept up with the pace of, you know, all these other states.

Universal pre-K, or statewide pre-K, hasn't been around in every state forever. It's just that we stayed still and a lot of other states moved forward over the course of the last couple decades. And so we see the same type of pattern across various different children's programs: that we just have not invested in kids and reinvested from those dips.

GILGER: Let me ask you, lastly, a little bit of a speculative question. But one of the big fears with this government shutdown, I think from folks like you who advocate for, you know, these issues, is that these cuts, while they may be temporary during the shutdown, will turn into permanent cuts. What would be sacrificed in that case? And even in a short-term sense during a shutdown, what will be sacrificed if states, in the end, have to kind of make up for those gaps?

MEEK: Well, it's really hard to think about what would be sacrificed in a state that already invests so little in early childhood programs, and in K-12 spending and, in general, in programs that help kids and families. And so ... it's really hard to speculate on that. I know that this conversation is happening in other states that have invested, for example, in universal pre-K, right?

Like, do we have to pare back on that in order to mitigate some of the harms that families are going to face because of Medicaid cuts or because of snap cuts that will come into play after H.R. 1 (Trump's spending bill).

GILGER: But we don't even have universal pre-K here, we don't even have universal kindergarten here.

MEEK: Which is why I'm struggling to figure out like ... K-12 is always a fear, right? And I feel like that is the fund that we always kind of default to that and pulling money there. So it's really hard to imagine what else —how far down we can go from where we're already at.

GILGER: Alright. Shantel Meek is the executive director of the Children's Equity Project at Arizona State University. Shantel, thank you for coming in. Appreciate it.

MEEK: Thanks for having me.