Representative Kadyn Wittman (D-15/Sioux Falls) has been trying for four years to get the Legislature to fund more free meals for school kids. Yesterday for the first time, she got a bill to that effect through committee.
On Monday, House Appropriations voted 7–2 to approve House Bill 1082, which would require schools to serve free school breakfasts and lunches to kids currently qualifying for reduced-price meals under federal income guidelines. This school year, Uncle Sam foots the bill for free school meals for kids in families making up to 130% of poverty wages and reduces the price to 30¢ for breakfast and 40¢ for lunch for kids from families making between 130% and 185% of the poverty line. In South Dakota and the other contiguous states, the reduced-price cutoff ranges from $39,128 for a single mom with one schoolkid to $100,178 for two parents with six kids. A two-parent+two-kid family qualifies for reduced-price meals up to $59,478 in yearly income.
House Approps requested a fiscal note from the Legislative Research Council, which said HB 1082 as amended will cost almost $60K less than the $650K a year she initially pitched:
If the department were only responsible for reimbursing districts the difference between the federal reimbursement per meal for meals served to students eligible for free meals and the federal reimbursement per meal for meals served to students eligible for reduced-price meals, the cost to the department would be $0.40 per lunch served and $0.30 per breakfast served. The ongoing annual cost to the state general fund from HB1082, in this case, would be approximately $592,517.
…[footnote 1] In FY2025, there were 1,166,561 lunches and 419,641 breakfasts served statewide by school districts to reduced-price-eligible students, according to South Dakota Department of Education data [Legislative Research Council, fiscal note on 2026 HB 1082, 2026.02.23].
That relatively small price tag was enough to convince six Republicans to join Democratic Representative Erik Muckey in approving HB 1082 for House consideration, but not grinchy conservative Rep. Al Novstrup (R-3/Aberdeen), who apparently asked his chatbot to write him a moral justification for not funding meals for low-income kids and got this specious excuse:
During Monday’s hearing in appropriations, Republican Rep. Al Novstrup said he wouldn’t support this bill due to the people making over $59,478 don’t qualify for reduced meals, but are still low income and can’t afford the $4 for lunch every day.
“My position is we’re solving the wrong problem,” he said. “The problem isn’t the person paying 40 cents. It is paying $4. That is family income per year is $200 away. That’s the problem I’d prefer we solve” [Gracie Terrall, “School Lunch Bill Heads to House Floor,” KELO-TV, 2026.02.23].
Sure, Al. If that’s the problem you’d prefer we solve, why didn’t propose an amendment yesterday (or an amendment last year, when you helped kill Rep. Wittman’s 2025 HB 1089 in committee, or a bill at any point in your 24 long years of legislating) to fund reduced-price meals for families making up to 200% of poverty, or 222.2%, or… well, Al, what is your threshold on this argument of infinite regress? No matter what income threshold we set, no matter what families we say we’re going to help, you can always ratchet up your dollar figure and say, “Well, what about the next family?”
(And Al, we’re already helping some of those next families… the ones who own big businesses. Last year alone, South Dakota handed out $863K to a Miner County swine CAFO, $2.57 million to Bel Brands cheese factory in Brookings, and $3.52 million to two dairy CAFOs. Surely the state can afford $600K to help buy kids some hot dogs, cheese, and milk.)
Every threshold is arbitrary and a little unfair to the family making threshold+1, so AI-Al’s argument boils down to, Either no one gets subsidized school meals, or everybody does.
Universal free school lunch: there’s an argument for that. Our neighbors in Minnesota do it. So do seven other states.
But Representative Wittman isn’t asking for us to shoot that moon. She knows such a healthy proposal stands no chance with South Dakota’s “pro-life” Republicans. She’s asking to fill perhaps the smallest compromise gap. She’s asking that, for kids already getting about a 90% discount on school meals, the state just cover that last 10%, at the low-low price of under $600K a year, far less money than the state plans to fling back to data centers and other wealthy corporate interests.
If the best argument Al’s chatbot can make is that we ought to pay for more kids’ schools meals, well, bring it on. HB 1082 is a good and entirely affordable step in that moral direction, making sure more kids get the food they need to perform well in school and helping more low-income families balance their budgets.
I like how Novstrup’s first name looks like (A)rtificial (I)intelligence in print.