For months, public schools across the country have doled out meals to families during the coronavirus pandemic, often for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

But reality is beginning to sink in as the students who subsidize those meals are at home, costing district meal programs millions a day in revenues with no real relief in sight.

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USA Today reports:

In the past 10 weeks alone, school districts and nonprofit organizations tasked with feeding children during the pandemic have lost at least $1 billion. The losses continue to climb with every lunch and breakfast workers serve and could force programs across the country to go into debt or dip into money dedicated to teachers and classrooms to stay afloat.

Shenae Rowe, nutrition director for Warrick County schools in Indiana, told the new site the small district has lost about $500,000 since March. In bigger districts like Orange County Public Schools in Orlando, the loss for March alone was $4 million, and nearly double that for both April and May, food service director Laura Gilbert said.

Officials said the added cost of personal protective equipment, hazard pay, extra packaging and bulk giveaways of a week worth of food at a time have increased expenses, while revenues and federal subsidies are drying up. And in several places, officials have been forced to temporarily or permanently shutter operations as food service workers contracted the coronavirus.

Julie Beer, food coordinator for California’s Ukiah Unified School District told USA Today she’s “grasping at straws to keep the kids fed.”

Gilbert said the situation forced her district to burn through emergency funds to continue to provide about 115,000 meals per day during the pandemic, and she estimates those funds will run out by August.

“Kate Wilson, executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, says the 12 large school districts in her association, which includes Orlando, are losing $38.9 million a week by serving food to their students during the school closures,” USA Today reports.

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“Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association, said the 861 districts in the survey who agreed to list their lost revenues reported collective losses of $626.4 million.”

The massive money problem comes despite $9 billion for school meal programs included in the CARES Act stimulus package approved by Congress this spring. The spending went to schools to reimburse for free- and reduced-priced meals, but also through the National School Lunch Program in the form of Electronic Benefit Transfer cards loaded with about $100 in cash for each family every month.

In Michigan, the EBT food funding costs more than $330 million to feed 895,000 students’ families, though not all of the families actually need the help. A provision in the National School Lunch Program called the “Community Eligibility Program” encourages school districts where at least 62.5% of students qualify for federal food subsidies to provide meals to all students, regardless of income, EAGnews reports.

That CEP apparently applies to meals served from schools and the EBT cards.

“The goal is to reduce the stigma of government-provided lunch by making it the same for everybody,” according to MLive.

In practice, the system is straining school food budgets and encouraging folks who don’t need the help to exploit the system.

In late April, Hillsborough County School District officials realized dozens of folks where going to multiple schools to pick up “free” food supplies like lunch meat, bread, milk, juice and snacks, then selling the groceries online for profit, WFLA reports.