Talking turkey

Curtains for "HKI"

Thanksgiving is one day in the year that no one in the United States should go hungry. Ya think? If you don’t agree with that then you probably are not reading this post.

While Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds is pardoning Tailfeathers and Wing-ding the turkeys, worth noting is that she and other elected state officials in the majority party who consent to her schemes don’t mind depriving people of food access other times of year.

No, I am not related to Debbie Downer, who spoiled Thanksgiving dinner. However, now that I have gathered some evidence, this holiday seems an appropriate time to point out that the governor’s Healthy Kids Iowa (HKI) summer food “pilot” program for school children did exactly that — deprived kids of food.

HKI offered boxes of government-selected food to families able to show up at designated distribution sites in June, July and August. Eligible were families of students in the federal free and reduced-cost lunch program at preK-12 schools. Also eligible were all students in “CEP schools.” CEP stands for Community Eligibility Provision, a program that allows schools in high-poverty neighborhoods to serve free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of family income, eliminating the need for household applications.

HKI was proposed by the governor, and approved by Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture, to take the place of the Summer EBT or “Sun Bucks” program. Reynolds has steadfastly refused to participate in Summer EBT the past three years.

Summer EBT simply puts $40 on benefit cards each of those three months for every eligible student. Those families can then buy the food they need wherever and whenever they shop. Instead, Iowa (Big Sister?) figured she could make the money go further by bulk buying and boxing presumably healthier foods that families could pick up if they had transportation to one of few sites in each county that had limited hours — assuming people would gratefully eat what they were given.

The fact that three more months have now passed with no public evaluation of the outcome tells me that HKI was anything but a rousing success. If it were, we certainly would have heard by now. The governor would be showing up at schools to crow about the results, the director of education and the director of health and human services by her side.

Those schools would not be in Dubuque County.

In the Dubuque Community School District, 5,415 students were eligible for Summer EBT or Healthy Kids Iowa. Western Dubuque Community School District had 871. No doubt the area’s private schools also enrolled eligible students, especially now that any family can use state money to send their kids to private schools. Offering affordable “school choice” for lower-income families is ostensibly the point of the voucher program. Children in early education programs were also eligible.

This is NOT a picture of what the actual Healthy Kids Iowa food box looked like, but we should talk about that some time, too. Was HKI really a vast improvement in terms of delivering healthier food that people would eat?

Cars lined up for the monthly Dubuque Area Labor Harvest food giveaway. I helped uber volunteer Mark Cook direct traffic. Only a fraction of these motorists arrived to sign up for Healthy Kids Iowa.

Dubuque Area Labor Harvest volunteers showed up for the onslaught of families with school kids that never arrived. Good thing, because many would have been turned away the first month and redirected to the food pantry. The monthly Harvest giveaway was given only 100 boxes that month.

In any case, using the 6,286 public school students as a conservative baseline, one might have predicted that the five sites in Dubuque County would have distributed 18,858 boxes of food over three months.

The reality was far different. Survey says: 4,326 boxes were given away to families, feeding 2,052 eligible students. That’s a batting average of .229 or 22.9 percent. That would not put a baseball player in the Hall of Fame unless they were multiple Gold Glove winners or came through in the clutch in several World Series games. Less than 1/3 of students were served at least once, which means many families that did participate did not show up more than once. So an estimated two-thirds of eligible families in Dubuque County did not get any food.

Sorry not sorry for the sports allusion. The illustration might help some people realize how the mighty HKI has struck out. By the way, I would probably be ruled “out-of-order” for making such a comparison in debate on the House floor. “The bill is not about baseball.” Though we all learned how to write “compare and contrast” essays in ninth grade composition, the Speaker of the House either skipped out on that class or has little sense of humor.

The information I use comes from reports made to River Bend Food Bank, which was charged with administering HKI in Dubuque County and reporting to the state.

River Bend received approximately $67,000 to administer the program in its footprint, including filing monthly paperwork and paying employees detailed to HKI. River Bend also received $20,000 to cover operational expenses such as rented trucks, fuel and equipment to unload product.

Local food pantries got nothing except more work for volunteers. The governor claimed HKI would save on administrative costs. In reality, those costs just got shifted. (On the other hand, the pantries were unknowingly being trained to deal with the suspension of SNAP and its probable future contraction as more people are excluded from coverage.)

Other states like Alabama have figured out how to administer Sun Bucks efficiently. They care about more than football. After 15 years of “status quo” budgets, the skeleton crews at the Iowa Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services apparently don’t have the bandwidth or technology to make the program work as designed.

Assuming $40 of food in each box distributed, hungry Dubuque County kids received grub valued at $173,040. Under Summer EBT/Sun Bucks, well north of $750,000 in food benefits would have been received by Dubuque County families with kids in school. The cash on the cards would continue to be available if not all was used over the summer.

Dubuque County has about three percent of the state’s population. This suggests that some $19 million in federal food benefits was left on the table statewide. That could also be a conservative estimate because the 11.3 percent child poverty rate in Dubuque County is lower than the Iowa child poverty rate, with estimates as high as 13.6 percent.

In any case, struggling grocery stores in rural communities and urban food deserts could have used the sales. Farmers in the state that supposedly “feeds the world” might have appreciated the business, too.

I remember walking home for lunch from grade school as a kid. Only five blocks. Cookie Grandma had something healthy ready for us (and we had 10 mouths to feed in our house)!

On the television at lunchtime was “Let’s Make a Deal” with host Monty Hall. The game show was revived in 2009, so many of you know how it goes: Do you want to trade in the toaster under the box for the possibility of winning a sofa behind door number two or the trip to Bermuda that might be behind curtain number three? However, if you do trade, you are just as likely to get “zonked” -- the curtain pulled back to reveal a piece of worthless merchandise. There goes the toaster or gas grill up in flames.

I don’t know about you, but unless the statewide report reveals the parents of Dubuque County to be slackers when it comes to feeding their kids, I would say that Iowa got zonked when the governor traded Summer EBT only to find HKI behind the door.

So I say “curtains” for this pilot project. Rewind the game show tape, take the Sun Bucks, thank Monty and call it a win for everyone.

APPENDIX

Over the summer, I published a post titled “Not Picture Perfect: The Outlook for Endangered Species in Iowa.” It mentioned that Iowa’s Wildlife Action Plan is due for its 10-year update. The draft plan has now been published and is available for public comment by December 6.

The Dubuque Area Land and Water Legacy is hosting a public input forum on December 3. Here are the details:

Katy Fullin, wildlife action plan manager for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, will be present to hear feedback from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the E.B. Lyons Center, Mines of Spain Recreation Area, 8991 Bellevue Heights Rd., Dubuque.

The state’s blueprint identifying comprehensive, proactive strategies to conserve wildlife and their habitats was last updated in 2015 and is required for states to receive funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Iowa received $672,500 in fiscal year 2025, along with a $250,000 special project grant for habitat management and monitoring for woodland species in the Driftless Area.

The current plan and proposed update on protecting endangered and threatened species can be found at https://www.iowadnr.gov/programs-services/iowas-wildlife/wildlife-action-plan.

No doubt I will return to this subject in the near future.