In an age where people want to ban books in our schools, we should be banning school meal debts for students.

Especially when we are sitting on a state surplus built on the backs of our most vulnerable.

Last fall Gov. Cooper announced added funding for free and reduced-price meals in public schools.

“More money will be rolled out to schools across North Carolina to provide for free breakfast for students.

Gov.Roy Cooper announced Monday $1.4 million will be distributed through competitive grants, which is up to $50,000 for each school district.“

Actually, no child who attends a public school in this state should have to pay for breakfast or lunch on any school day.

No child.

Of course, there will be those like Tim Moore and Phil Berger who will say that it will be an added expense even though we as a state have incredible surpluses due to not investing in our schools and other vital needs in the state.

It would not take too much to make this happen.

And here’s one place that we could find ready money: the Opportunity Grants. Why? Because the money set aside for this opaquely nontransparent program has never been fully spent even though the amount is getting increased every year.

From the Opportunity Scholarship Summary from the state:

The total amount of scholarships awarded in the four-year period chronicled above is just over $320,000,000. Here’s what (was) budgeted for the program over a ten year window including the years referred to above as it presented in Senate Bill 406 back in April.

That is a lot of money.

But look at the number of scholarships awarded for those four years and the actual number accepted. In other words, look at the number of scholarships the state would have doled out versus what was actually accepted.

For 2019-2020, the number of new scholarships awarded was 8,190. The number of new scholarships accepted was 6,131. That left 2,059 unused.

For the 2020-2021 school year, the difference in the number of new scholarships awarded and the number that were accepted was 4,327 (12,832 awarded – 8,505 accepted).

For the 2021-2022 school year, that difference was 5,735 (13,456 awarded – 7,721 accepted).

For 2022-2023, that difference was 6,923 (17,012 awarded – 6,923 accepted).

Over those four years the number of new scholarships awarded was 19,044 more than new scholarships accepted.

19,044.

Each Opportunity Grant is worth around $5,000 for this past school year.

Multiply that by the number of scholarships not accepted but obviously “budgeted” and you get around a little under $100 million.

Enough to do this: