New law will provide free school lunch for 40K students in Utah

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Utah Rep. Tyler Clancy's HB100 expands free school lunch eligibility for 40,000 students.
Gov. Spencer Cox praised HB100 as he signed it Tuesday, highlighting its role in reducing food insecurity stigma.
The bill encourages "share tables" to cut food waste, aiding 113,190 food-insecure children in Utah.

SALT LAKE CITY — During his time as a police officer, Tyler Clancy responded to one call that led to him transporting a young girl to school.

On the way to school, he said the girl began to cry, revealing she had missed the school's breakfast — along with dinner at home the night before — meaning she would have to wait until the school served lunch to get her next meal.

"It broke my heart on so many levels," said Clancy, now a state representative for Provo.

In this instance, Clancy was able to take the girl to McDonald's for breakfast, but he knew her situation wasn't unique.

Experiences like this one inspired Clancy to run HB100, which expands the number of Utah's K-12 students eligible to receive free school lunches while shielding participating kids from embarrassment and aiming to reduce food waste.

On Tuesday, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox ceremonially signed the bill into law, saying it was "among my favorite" bills of the 2025 legislative session.

Utah's school lunch debt is approximately $2.8 million; data from Feeding America shows it is home to 113,190 children who do not have access to enough food to meet their basic needs.

The new law will reportedly provide no-cost meals for 40,000 students currently receiving "reduced price" meals.

"What HB100 represents is a system that's coming together to, hopefully, not just fix it for one person but (alleviate food insecurity) for years to come and for all those children who are in need," Clancy said.

And the bill goes even further than simply providing meals for hungry students by including built-in protections to shield students from being stigmatized or feeling embarrassed for benefiting from it. Special buttons, different-colored lunch trays, or other things that might identify free-meal recipients to their classmates are prohibited under the bill.

In the same vein, school administrators and staff will only be allowed to speak to parents about a child's participation in the free school lunch program.

Additionally, the bill aims to reduce food waste. The Utah Food Bank estimates that approximately 600,000 tons of food is wasted every year in Utah. To help address some of this, the bill encourages schools to implement "share tables" where unopened or sealed foods can be shared instead of simply tossed into the trash.

"This bill and what it accomplishes isn't just about providing school lunch. It's about helping kids learn, and kids can't learn when they're hungry," Cox said.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.