Editorial: Giving SNAP funds to students is a late reaction

The biggest problem with bailing water out of the bottom of a leaky boat is that it doesn’t prioritize fixing the problem over dealing with the problem.

Fill a bucket with water and dump it over the side? It might be the first instinct, but that water is immediately replaced by more water from the same hole. If you are lucky, you bail a tiny bit faster than the water comes into the boat, slowing but not stopping the inevitable sinking.

But what if you plugged the hole first? Then you have all the time in the world to get that water out and get your boat ship-shape.

Pennsylvania recently announced that school students who qualify for free lunches will receive $370 apiece in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds. It’s a way to make up for the meals the kids didn’t receive since Gov. Tom Wolf announced pandemic school closings on March 13.

It is the state’s implementation of a federal program allowed under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, introduced March 11 and passed on March 18.

Two months later, it is finally in a position to do its job.

But in those two months, kids didn’t just sit by quietly starving. The schools and the community didn’t allow that. Schools coordinated efforts to get lunches and breakfasts from their own kitchen to the kids. Restaurants and stores stepped up to make lunches available to families for the asking.

In other words, the government is giving kids a bucket — but the boat is already patched and the water is gone. Most schools are in the home stretch of the year. Some will finish as early as next week.

The SNAP funds are fixing a problem that is behind the schools and the families. If the state and the federal government want to help them, they need to be anticipating the next problems, not bailing water from boats that someone else already has rescued.

Those kids, for example, are facing another three months at home as as they head into summer vacation. Schools and other organizations usually step in to fill that gap with lunches at empty cafeterias or church dining rooms through a related federal operation — the Summer Food Service Program.

That is the next leak to worry about when it comes to hungry kids. Or look beyond it to the issue of meals for the fall, making proactive advanced plans for what might happen if school doesn’t open, or if another outbreak causes it to close again.

Too much of what has happened for the last three months has been about reaction, but reaction doesn’t keep people from getting hurt or sick or losing jobs or suffering financial hardship. It only bails the water out after the boat has been damaged.