Thousands of SC students — including every Richland 1 child — to get free EBT cards
South Carolina will send a food-purchasing card to thousands of K-12 students, including every child in the Richland 1 school district, to help offset the cost of school meals that were lost during the pandemic.
A one-time Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, card worth $330 will be mailed to South Carolina students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch at their schools between March 16 and June 3, when schools were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the S.C. Department of Social Services. Some 467,000 students are expected to receive the one-time funds.
Every child who attends a Community Eligibility Provision school, regardless of their family’s income, will receive an EBT card. Students at these schools all receive free lunch regularly due to their schools’ large population of low-income students. This applies to every school in the Richland 1 school district, which has a high overall poverty rate, as well as to a number of individual schools within other Midlands school districts. Each of the more than 23,000 students in Richland 1 will receive the funds.
The funding for the Pandemic EBT program comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help supplement families’ food costs amid the pandemic school closures. South Carolina is one of 47 states to accept the funding, according to DSS.
Extended school closures during the pandemic have “exacerbated concerns about families’ food and financial security during this time,” the state social services agency said in a recent news release.
“No child in South Carolina should have to go hungry,” State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman said in the release. “The Pandemic EBT program will help ensure our most vulnerable students and their families have the resources needed to put food on the table during the summer so they are healthy and ready to learn when schools re-start in the fall.”
The Pandemic EBT funding is available to students at both public and private schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program. The cards are not a replacement for any schools’ regular summer feeding programs.
The amount of money on the EBT cards is equal to the daily school meal rate for each child — $5.70 — multiplied by the number of days schools were closed this spring, a total of 58 days. If a student became eligible for free or reduced lunch at some point in the middle of those 58 days, they will receive a prorated amount on their Pandemic EBT card.
The cards are expected to be mailed between July 20-24. They will be sent to students’ home addresses that are on file with their school districts.
For students whose families already receive supplemental nutrition assistance, or SNAP benefits, their one-time pandemic meal funding will be added to their regular EBT card for July, rather than mailed as a separate card.
Recipients will have one year to use the funds on the Pandemic EBT card. The funds cannot be transferred to anyone else and should not be used by anyone outside of the student’s household. If a family chooses not to use the Pandemic EBT card, they should destroy it, according to the social services agency.
The agency published a list of frequently asked questions and answers about the Pandemic EBT program online at dss.sc.gov, as well as a list of schools and the number of children at each school who are eligible to receive the Pandemic EBT cards.
Families who qualify for a Pandemic EBT benefit but do not receive a card in the mail by Aug. 15 should email PEBTBenefits@dss.sc.gov.
This story was originally published July 8, 2020 at 11:20 AM.
