Public schools have been serving all students free meals since the COVID-19 pandemic first disrupted K-12 education. In March 2022, Congress rejected calls to keep up the federal funding required to sustain that practice and left that money out of a US$1.5 trillion spending package that President Joe Biden signed into law on March 11, 2022. We asked food policy expert Marlene Schwartz to explain why free meals make a difference and what will happen next.

How did the COVID-19 pandemic initially affect the school lunch program?

In March 2020, nearly all U.S. K-12 school buildings closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the federal government’s National School Lunch Program, quickly granted waivers to increase program flexibility and accommodate the challenges of the pandemic.

These waivers, which have been renewed several times, were critically important for school food service programs as the programs abruptly shifted away from serving meals in cafeterias and designed new distribution models to continue to feed students. Many school meal staff across the country created grab-and-go meals that families could pick up, which was particularly important in the spring of 2020 and the following school year. Another major change, which has continued during the 2021-2022 school year, is that school systems are able to serve meals to all students at no cost.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 30 million lunches were served every school day to K-12 students through the National School Lunch Program. Schools provided roughly three-quarters of those meals at reduced rates or no cost at all – with the federal government reimbursing a portion of the cost of those meals.

How much money is involved?

The program cost $14 billion in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted it.

The price of a school lunch for families without free or reduced-cost meals varies. In 2017, full-price lunches tended to run between $2.50 and $2.75 apiece.

Are all public school students still getting free meals?

Yes. However, that will no doubt change once the latest waiver expires on June 30, 2022.

Advocates urged Congress to keep funding school nutrition programs at higher levels. But Congress did not include that money in the $1.5 trillion spending bill House and Senate lawmakers passed in March 2022.

This means that next fall, most schools will have to resume the old three-tiered system where some families don’t pay at all, some receive discounted lunches, and others must pay full price.

Two states will buck that trend. California and Maine will continue providing universal school meals after the federal waiver ends due to measures their state legislators passed and governors signed into law during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the federal level, more than a dozen senators and roughly 50 members of the House of Representatives backed proposed legislation in 2021 that would permanently make school lunch free for all students, regardless of their income. There is significant support for this idea among advocates, but the future of this type of federal legislation remains to be seen.

What are the advantages of making school meals free to everyone?

In my view, the biggest advantage to universal school meals is that more students actually eat nutritious school meals. Following the regulations that emerged from the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, the nutritional quality of school meals improved significantly, and a recent study found that schools typically provide the healthiest foods that children eat all day.

The research shows that making school meals free for everyone improves attendance and boosts diet quality. It also decreases the risk of food insecurity and the stigma associated with receiving a free meal. When no one has to pay, the growing problem of school meal debt is also eliminated.

There are important logistical benefits to universal school meals. Families don’t have to fill out any paperwork to establish their eligibility for free or reduced-price meals. And cafeteria staff can focus on serving the meals if they don’t need to track payments.

What’s wrong with charging some students for lunch again?

You have to look at the costs and benefits of the big picture. Universal school meals provide significant benefits to the school community as a whole – most notably, reductions in food insecurity and improvements in student diet quality. I believe these benefits are far greater than the marginal cost of providing free meals to students who would otherwise pay.

The fall of 2022 is also much too early to revert back to the three-tiered system because school food programs continue to face significant challenges. Supply chain disruptions have made it harder to buy some kinds of food, including chicken and whole grain products. In addition, many schools are having trouble hiring the staff they need to prepare and serve the meals, and inflation is increasing food costs.

What do you see happening in the future?

Ideally, the federal government will reconsider this issue and support universal school meals.

If that does not happen, advocates, policymakers and researchers will be watching what happens in California and Maine. We will be able to compare what happens in these states versus those that do not continue to provide all students with free meals. My hope is that this information will inform future decisions about implementing universal school meals for all students nationally.

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Marlene B. Schwartz, Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Connecticut

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Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Why do flocks of birds swoop and swirl together in the sky? – Artie W., age 9, Astoria, New York

A shape-shifting flock of thousands of starlings, called a murmuration, is amazing to see. As many as 750,000 birds join together in flight. The birds spread out and come together. The flock splits apart and fuses together again. Murmurations constantly change direction, flying up a few hundred meters, then zooming down to almost crash to the ground. They look like swirling blobs, making teardrops, figure eights, columns and other shapes. A murmuration can move fast – starlings fly up to 50 miles per hour (80 kilometers per hour).

The European or common starling, like many birds, forms groups called flocks when foraging for food or migrating. But a murmuration is different. This special kind of flock is named for the sound of a low murmur it makes from thousands of wingbeats and soft flight calls.

Murmurations form about an hour before sunset in fall, winter and early spring, when the birds are near where they’ll sleep. After maybe 45 minutes of this spectacular aerial display, the birds all at once drop down into their roost for the night.

Why do starlings form murmurations?

Unlike the V formations of migrating geese, murmurations provide no aerodynamic advantage.

Scientists think a murmuration is a visual invitation to attract other starlings to join a group night roost. One theory is that spending the night together keeps the starlings warmer as they share their body heat. It might also reduce the chance an individual bird would be eaten overnight by a predator such as an owl or marten.

This dilution effect might be part of the reason murmurations happen: The more starlings in the flock, the lower the risk to any one bird of being the one that gets snagged by a predator. Predators are more likely to catch the nearest prey, so the swirling of a murmuration could happen as individual birds try to move toward the safer middle of the crowd. Scientists call this the selfish herd effect.

Of course, the more birds in a flock, the more eyes and ears to detect the predator before it’s too late.

And a gigantic mass of whirling, swirling birds can make it hard to focus on a single target. A falcon or hawk can get confused and distracted by tricky wave patterns in the murmuration’s movements. It also must be careful not to collide with the flock and get hurt.

Over 3,000 citizen scientist volunteers reported spotting murmurations in a recent study. A third of them saw a raptor attack the murmuration. That observation suggests that murmurations do form to help protect the birds from predators – but it’s also possible a huge murmuration would be what attracted a hawk, for instance, in the first place.

How do starlings coordinate their behavior?

Murmurations have no leader and follow no plan. Instead, scientists believe movements are coordinated by starlings observing what others around them are doing. Birds in the middle can see through the flock on all sides to its edge and beyond. Somehow they keep track of how the flock is moving as a whole and adjust accordingly.

To learn what’s happening inside murmurations, some researchers film them using many cameras at the same time. Then they use computer programs to track the movements of individual starlings and create 3D models of the flock.

The videos reveal that the birds are not as densely packed as they might appear from the ground; there is room to maneuver. Starlings are closer to their side neighbors than those in front or behind. Starlings on the edge frequently move deeper into the flock.

Mathematicians and computer scientists try to create virtual murmurations using rules that birds might follow in a flock – like moving in the same direction as their neighbor, staying close and not colliding. From these simulations, it seems that each bird must keep track of seven neighbors and adjust based on what they’re doing to keep the murmuration from falling apart in a chaotic mess. And they do all this while flying as fast as they can.

Large schools of fish can appear to behave like murmurations, as do groups of some swarming insects, including honeybees. All these synchronized movements can happen so fast within flocks, herds, swarms and schools that some scientists once thought it required animal ESP!

Biologists, mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists and engineers are all working to figure out how animals carry out these displays. Curiosity drives this research, of course. But it may also have practical applications too, like helping develop autonomous vehicles that can travel in tight formation and work in coordinated groups without colliding.

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Tom Langen, Professor of Biology, Clarkson University

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Brace yourselves, allergy suffers – new research shows pollen season is going to get a lot longer and more intense with climate change.

Our latest study finds that the U.S. will face up to a 200% increase in total pollen this century if the world continues producing carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, power plants and other sources at a high rate. Pollen season in general will start up to 40 days earlier in the spring and last up to 19 days longer than today under that scenario.

As atmospheric scientists, we study how the atmosphere and climate affect trees and plants. While most studies focus on pollen overall, we zoomed in on more than a dozen different types of grasses and trees and how their pollen will affect regions across the U.S. in different ways. For example, species like oak and cypress will give the Northeast the biggest increase, but allergens will be on the rise just about everywhere, with consequences for human health and the economy.

If your head is pounding at just the thought of it, we also have some good news, at least for knowing in advance when pollen waves are coming. We’re working on using the model from this study to develop more accurate local pollen forecasts.

Why pollen is increasing

Let’s start with the basics. Pollen – the dust-like grains produced by grasses and plants – contains the male genetic material for a plant’s reproduction.

How much pollen is produced depends on how the plant grows. Rising global temperatures will boost plant growth in many areas, and that, in turn, will affect pollen production. But temperature is only part of the equation. We found that the bigger driver of the future pollen increase will be rising carbon dioxide emissions.

The higher temperature will extend the growing season, giving plants more time to emit pollen and reproduce. Carbon dioxide, meanwhile, fuels photosynthesis, so plants may grow larger and produce more pollen. We found that carbon dioxide levels may have a much larger impact on pollen increases than temperature in the future.

Pollen changes will vary by region

We looked at 15 different pollen types, rather than treating all pollen the same as many past studies have.

Typically, pollination starts with leafy deciduous trees in late winter and spring. Alder, birch and oak are the three top deciduous trees for causing allergies, though there are others, like mulberry. Then grasses come out in the summer, followed by ragweed in late summer. In the Southeast, evergreen trees like mountain cedar and juniper (in the cypress family) start in January. In Texas, “cedar fever” is the equivalent of hay fever.

We found that in the Northeast, pollen seasons for a lot of allergenic trees will increasingly overlap as temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions rise. For example, it used to be that oak trees would release pollen first, and then birch would pollinate. Now we see more overlap of their pollen seasons.

In general, pollen season will change more in the north than in the south, because of larger temperature increases in northern areas.

Southeastern regions, including Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, can expect large grass and weed pollen increases in the future. The Pacific Northwest is likely to see peak pollen season a month earlier because of the early pollen season of alder.

Silver lining: We can improve pollen forecasting

Most pollen forecasts right now provide a very broad estimate. Part of the problem is that there aren’t many observing stations for pollen counts. Most are run by allergy clinics, and there are less than 100 of these stations distributed across the country. Michigan, where we live, doesn’t have any.

It’s a very labor-intensive process to actually measure different types of pollen. As a result, current forecasts have a lot of uncertainties. These likely are based in part on what a station has observed in the past and the weather forecast.

Our model, if integrated into a forecasting framework, could provide more targeted pollen forecasts across the country.

We can estimate where the trees are from satellite data and on-the-ground surveys. We also know how temperature influences when pollen comes out – what we call the phenology of the pollen. With that information, we can use meteorological factors like wind, relative humidity and precipitation to figure out how much pollen gets into the air, and atmospheric models can show how it moves and blows around, to create a real-time forecast.

All of that information allows us to look at where pollen might be in space and time, so people dealing with allergies will know what’s coming in their area.

We’re currently talking with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab about ways to integrate that information into a tool for air quality forecasting.

There are still some unknowns when it comes to long-term pollen projections. For example, scientists don’t fully understand why plants produce more pollen in some years than others. There’s not a good way to include that in models. It’s also not fully clear how plants will respond if carbon dioxide levels go through the roof. Ragweed and residential trees are also hard to capture. There are very few ragweed surveys showing where these plants are growing in the U.S., but that can be improved.

Pollen levels are already on the rise

A study in 2021 found that the overall pollen season was already about 20 days longer in North America than it was in 1990 and pollen concentrations were up about 21%.

Increasing pollen levels in the future will have a much broader impact than a few sniffles and headaches. Seasonal allergies affect about 30% of the population, and they have economic impacts, from health costs to missed working days.

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Yingxiao Zhang, Ph.D. Student in Atmospheric Science, University of Michigan and Allison L. Steiner, Professor of Atmospheric Science, University of Michigan

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