Oklahoma taxpayers fund students’ school lunches statewide, but taxpayers are not getting their money’s worth.

In recent legislative studies, experts warned state lawmakers that many school meals are of poor nutritional value. That reduces the student benefit and can even contribute to lower academic achievement. At worst, low-quality lunches may put children on a path to poor health outcomes as adults and increase the demand for future taxpayer-subsidized health treatment for years.

Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, noted that about one in four children nationwide is overweight or obese, and one in three teenagers has pre-diabetes.

Yet roughly one in four school meals today are of poor nutritional quality, he said.

Nutritious meals cost slightly more but the added taxpayer cost would likely be offset by reduced demand for taxpayer-funded health care in the future, he noted.

“This saves money,” Mozaffarian said. “Because there’s health-care costs to these diseases.” 

And improving the nutritional quality of Oklahoma school lunches also has academic benefits.

“When you improve school food, it can help bolster academic outcomes in a statistically significant way,” said Nora LaTorre, chief executive officer of Eat Real, a doctor-founded organization that focuses on nutrition.

As everyone knows, hungry children are less likely to be attentive and focused. That’s one reason why, among the lowest-income students, the academic improvement associated with more nutritious meals is especially notable.

“If we just look at those students, their increases in test scores are about 50-percent higher,” said Justin Gallagher, associate professor at the Department of Agricultural Economics at Montana State University.

LaTorre noted that one school her group worked with was able to remove 34 pounds of sugar per student per year by adjusting the type of food served.

Santa Fe South High School, an Oklahoma City public charter school, is in the second year of operating its Child Nutrition Program independently. The school has seen academic outcomes rise as they have improved the quality of school lunches, although officials caution that is just one of several factors driving that trend. 

A 1999 study in Tennessee found that reduced class size improves academic outcomes, but you must cut class size by roughly one-third at a cost of $4,157 more per student in 2025 dollars to generate that benefit.

In contrast, the added cost of improved nutrition is about $375 per student and it still generates notable improvement in student test outcomes.

It makes little sense to subsidize lunches that put children on a path to lifelong poor health, especially if it also impedes their ability to learn today. If we are going to fund school lunches, we should seek the maximum benefit.