Coronavirus Live Updates: As Child Hunger Soars, Federal Aid Lags

[Stuart G]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/us/coronavirus-live-updates.html

Please scroll down below top headline, past the picture to the main story..thank you
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Below is headline of story...

An emergency program’s slow start leaves millions of hungry children waiting.

An emergency program’s slow start leaves millions of hungry children waiting.
As child hunger soars to levels without modern precedent, an emergency program Congress created two months ago has reached only a small fraction of the 30 million children it was intended to help.

The program, Pandemic-EBT, aims to compensate for the declining reach of school meals by placing their value on electronic cards that families can use in grocery stores. But collecting lunch lists from thousands of school districts, transferring them to often outdated state computers and issuing specialized cards has proved much harder than envisioned, leaving millions of needy families waiting to buy food.

Congress approved the effort in mid-March as part of the Families First act, its first major virus relief package. By May 15, only about 15 percent of eligible children had received benefits, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Just 12 states had started sending money, and Michigan and Rhode Island alone had finished.

Among pandemic-related hardship, child hunger stands out for its urgency and symbolic resonance — after decades of exposés and reforms, a country of vast wealth still struggles to feed its young. So vital are school meals in some places, states are issuing replacement benefits in waves to keep grocers from being overwhelmed.

[Karadeniz]

1. Lord. Accomplishing this doesn't seem to have been well investigated.