Roughly 67,000 Colorado kids could be getting summer meals — they just don’t know it

A new federal program that provides grocery money in the summer for kids who qualify for free lunch at school could feed an estimated additional 67,000 kids. 

Yet here’s how many applications for the summer food assistance program Colorado received last summer — 25. 

It’s not as bad as it sounds, as more than 550,000 students in Colorado were automatically enrolled in the summer food program, which meant their families received a grocery card loaded with $120 per child, or $40 per month. 

Those who automatically qualified for the program, called Summer EBT, included families who had submitted paperwork to receive free or reduced-price school lunch or applied for monthly food assistance benefits. Children in foster care are automatically eligible, as are kids who are homeless or migrants — if their families already qualified for free school lunch or monthly food assistance.

Still, an estimated 67,000 children across the state missed out on the program because their families would have had to apply and did not know that, according to an analysis by an independent consultant. That adds up to about $8 million in federal funds that Colorado didn’t tap into last summer. 

State officials are hoping to reach more kids this summer, the second year of the federal program. 

The summer food assistance program grew out of a COVID-era plan, called the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer, approved by Congress to provide grocery money to families while their children were not attending in-person school. 

Students whose families need to apply for the summer benefit include those who do not have up-to-date household income data on file with their school. This is particularly an issue for families who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch but don’t fill out the paperwork because their children attend a school where everyone gets free lunch.

At schools where a majority of the students qualify for free lunch, a measure of poverty, every student can receive free lunch under what the federal government calls “community eligibility.” 

New residents of Colorado, or those who enrolled in the free-lunch program after their school submitted its yearly eligibility paperwork, also were not automatically enrolled in the summer food program. 

“Only a small number of students need to apply in order to get benefits,” AnneMarie Harper, communications director for the Colorado Department of Human Services said via email. The department declined to give an interview in response to The Sun’s questions about why the state didn’t reach more children last year. 

The state would not estimate how many eligible children need to apply for the program, saying it was too new for state officials to have a “comprehensive estimate.” 

But a public policy expert who has studied the issue nationally found that among the dozen states he queried, Colorado had the lowest percentage of applications from eligible families. 

“Millions of dollars never made it to the group of eligible families that are required to submit an online application,” said David Rubel, a New York public policy consultant. “Very few families in Colorado submitted the application.”

He’s concerned that $500 million nationwide — including an estimated $8 million in Colorado — will go unused by states and returned to the federal government, which is similar to what happened last year. 

According to his research, just 0.003% of the 67,400 Colorado children whose families would have been eligible had they submitted the application actually did so. 

The average of the 12 states Rubel researched was 6.4%, meaning 4 million eligible families did not submit applications. He deduced the number of eligible children in each state by using U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates stating that about 20% of eligible children would have to apply for the program, while 80% would have already enrolled in some other program that made them automatically eligible. 

The Department of Agriculture also had estimated that Colorado would have 337,000 eligible children in all — but the state instead found 550,000.

A major issue last summer was timing. 

Following federal approval, states had just two months in which to accept applications, which meant little time to advertise. This year, though, states have several months to let people know about the program. The application “will be live on the website in the coming weeks,” Harper said.

Before the state mailed benefits cards last summer, state officials had to identify the 550,000 children who automatically qualified for the program and had to coordinate with schools to get mailing addresses for those families. Cards were mailed out across the country last summer, though some did not arrive until August. 

Colorado last year advertised the program with a website and posters, fliers and social media posts in English and Spanish. Harper said the state “continues to focus our efforts on building awareness of the program,” including by hosting town hall and “road show” presentations and partnering with the Family Resource Center Association, which has 32 locations in Colorado.

“For the students who were enrolled last year and remain eligible this year, CDHS will simply refill their cards,” she said. “At the end of last year’s program, we asked students and families to hold on to their benefit cards so we could do just that.”

This summer’s program is already authorized in the federal budget and has not been targeted in the Trump administration’s spending cutbacks.