The opportunity for all Hawaiʻi public school students to get free meals at school during the pandemic could end at the close of the school year, potentially cutting off thousands of kids from access to nutritious meals.

When the pandemic hit two years ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the nation’s school meal program, waived certain restrictions, allowing all children nationwide to get free school meals. The loosening of rules was designed to help blunt the educational, health and economic impacts of the pandemic.

The waivers also gave schools more flexibility, allowing them to provide things such as grab-and-go meals and multiple meals pick-ups on school campuses. The USDA also provided a higher meal reimbursement rate for schools to ease the financial cost.

But local child nutrition advocates are now on edge after the latest federal spending bill failed to extend these waivers for next school year by excluding funding for the program in the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill.

Hawaiʻi is among the 10 states with the highest projected food insecurity rate in 2021 at 15 percent, jumping about 4 percentage points from 2019, according to the nonprofit Feeding America.

For children specifically, Hawaiʻi had the second highest-food insecurity rate in the nation in 2021, at about 25 percent.

Hawaiʻi also experienced one of the steepest drops in average daily participation in the school lunch program between the 2018-19 and 2020-21 school years. Roughly 100,200 kids took advantage of school lunches just before the pandemic, but that number dropped to 39,400 by 2020-21, a 61 percent decrease, according to a February 2022 report from Food Research & Action Center.

Experts say the dip in Hawaiʻi may be larger because not all schools offered a grab-and-go option or had limited meal pick-up times. Plus, Hawaiʻi may have kept kids in remote learning for a longer period than other schools around the country.

The USDA waivers “allowed a lot of flexibilities that weren’t there before,” said Daniela Spoto, Hawaiʻi Appleseed’s director of anti-hunger initiatives, particularly when it comes to reaching kids in rural communities.

“By taking advantage of waivers to deliver meal kits to rural communities, we could define rural as anything but urban Honolulu,” Spoto added. “Any child under 18 could sign up to get free meals last summer.”

The Food Research & Action Center said that given the economic and health impacts of the pandemic, offering free meals to all students “should remain the new normal for all students across the country.”

“The waivers that have been critical to maintaining school meal operations must remain available as long as needed,” the policy center wrote in its February 2022 report.