Chuck Isenhart is an investigative reporter, photographer, and recovering Iowa state legislator offering research, analysis, education, and public affairs advocacy at his Substack newsletter Iowa Public Policy Dude, where this essay first appeared.
Thanksgiving is one day in the year that no one in the United States should go hungry. Ya think? If you don’t agree with that, you probably are not reading this post.
While Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds pardoned Tailfeathers and Wing-ding the turkeys this week, it’s worth noting that she and others in the majority party who consent to her schemes don’t mind depriving people of food access other times of year.
No, I am not related to Debbie Downer, who spoiled Thanksgiving dinner. However, now that I have gathered some evidence, this holiday seems an appropriate time to point out that the governor’s Healthy Kids Iowa summer food “pilot” program for school children did exactly that—deprived kids of food.
Healthy Kids Iowa offered boxes of government-selected food to families able to show up at designated distribution sites in June, July, and August. Families of students who qualified for the federal free and reduced-cost lunch program at preK-12 schools were eligible, along with all students in “Community Eligibility Provision” schools. That program allows schools in high-poverty neighborhoods to serve free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of family income, eliminating the need for household applications.
Reynolds proposed the Healthy Kids Iowa pilot program, and President Donald Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the plan to take the place of the Summer EBT or “Sun Bucks” program. Reynolds has refused to participate in Summer EBT the past three years.
Summer EBT simply puts $40 on benefit cards each of those three months for every eligible student. Those families can buy the food they need wherever and whenever they shop. Instead, Iowa (Big Sister?) figured she could make the money go further by bulk buying and boxing presumably healthier foods. Families could pick up the boxes—if they had transportation to one of few sites in each county that had limited hours. The governor assumed people would gratefully eat what they were given.
Three more months have now passed with no public evaluation of the outcome, which tells me that Healthy Kids Iowa was anything but a rousing success. If it were, we certainly would have heard by now. The governor would be showing up at schools to crow about the results, with the directors of state agencies for education and health and human services by her side.
Those schools would not be in Dubuque County.
In the Dubuque Community School District, 5,415 students were eligible for Summer EBT or Healthy Kids Iowa. Western Dubuque Community School District had 871 eligible kids. No doubt the area’s private schools also enrolled eligible students, especially now that any family can use state money to send their kids to private schools. Offering affordable “school choice” for lower-income families is ostensibly the point of the voucher program. Children in early education programs were also eligible.
Democratic State Representative Larry McBurney took this picture of a Healthy Kids Iowa food box at the Urbandale food pantry in July 2025. Republished with permission
In any case, using the 6,286 public school students as a conservative baseline, one might have predicted that the five sites in Dubuque County would have distributed 18,858 boxes of food over three months.
The reality was far different.
Cars lined up for the monthly Dubuque Area Labor Harvest food giveaway. I helped uber volunteer Mark Cook direct traffic. Only a fraction of these motorists arrived to sign up for Healthy Kids Iowa.
Dubuque Area Labor Harvest volunteers showed up for the onslaught of families with school kids that never arrived. Good thing, because many would have been turned away the first month and redirected to the food pantry. The monthly Harvest giveaway was given only 100 boxes that month.
Survey says: 4,326 boxes were given away to families in Dubuque County, feeding 2,052 eligible students. That’s a batting average of .229 or 22.9 percent. That would not put a baseball player in the Hall of Fame unless they were multiple Gold Glove winners or came through in the clutch in several World Series games.
Side note: Sorry, not sorry for the sports allusion. The illustration might help some people realize how the mighty Healthy Kids Iowa has struck out. By the way, I would probably be ruled “out-of-order” for making such a comparison in debate on the Iowa House floor. “The bill is not about baseball.” Though we all learned how to write “compare and contrast” essays in ninth grade composition, House Speaker Pat Grassley either skipped out on that class or has little sense of humor.
In Dubuque County, less than one-third of students were served at least once, which means many families that did participate did not show up more than once. So an estimated two-thirds of eligible families here received no food through the Healthy Kids Iowa program.
The information I use comes from reports made to River Bend Food Bank, which was charged with administering Healthy Kids Iowa in Dubuque County and reporting to the state.
River Bend received approximately $67,000 to administer the program in its footprint, including filing monthly paperwork and paying employees detailed to Healthy Kids Iowa. River Bend also received $20,000 to cover operational expenses such as rented trucks, fuel, and equipment to unload product.
Local food pantries got nothing except more work for volunteers. The governor claimed Healthy Kids Iowa would save on administrative costs. In reality, those costs just got shifted. (On the other hand, the pantries were unknowingly being trained to deal with the suspension of federal SNAP benefits and that program’s probable future contraction as more people are excluded from coverage.)
Other states like Alabama have figured out how to administer Sun Bucks efficiently. They care about more than football. After 15 years of “status quo” budgets, the skeleton crews at the Iowa Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services apparently don’t have the bandwidth or technology to make the program work as designed.
Assuming $40 of food in each box distributed, hungry Dubuque County kids received grub valued at $173,040. Under Summer EBT/Sun Bucks, well north of $750,000 in food benefits would have been received by Dubuque County families with kids in school. The cash on the cards would continue to be available if not all was used over the summer.
Dubuque County has about 3 percent of the state’s population. This suggests that some $19 million in federal food benefits was left on the table statewide. That could also be a conservative estimate, because the 11.3 percent child poverty rate in Dubuque County is lower than the Iowa child poverty rate, with estimates as high as 13.6 percent.
In any case, struggling grocery stores in rural communities and urban food deserts could have used the sales. Farmers in the state that supposedly “feeds the world” might have appreciated the business, too.
I remember walking home for lunch from grade school as a kid. Only five blocks. Cookie Grandma had something healthy ready for us—and we had ten mouths to feed in our house!
On the television at lunchtime was “Let’s Make a Deal” with host Monty Hall. The game show was revived in 2009, so many of you know how it goes: Do you want to trade in the toaster under the box for the possibility of winning a sofa behind door number two or the trip to Bermuda that might be behind curtain number three? However, if you do trade, you are just as likely to get “zonked”—the curtain pulled back to reveal a piece of worthless merchandise. There goes the toaster or gas grill up in flames.
I don’t know about you, but unless the statewide report reveals the parents of Dubuque County to be slackers when it comes to feeding their kids, I would say that Iowa got zonked when the governor traded Summer EBT, only to find Healthy Kids Iowa behind the door.
So I say “curtains” for this pilot project. Rewind the game show tape, take the Sun Bucks, thank Monty and call it a win for everyone.
Editor’s note from Laura Belin: The At the Iowa Farm Table podcast released an episode in July scrutinizing the “health” aspect of the Healthy Kids Iowa program. You can listen to that podcast here. Beth Hoffman interviewed Paige Chickering of the Save the Children Action Network, Missy Loux of the First Lutheran Food Pantry, and Christina Romp, a Healthy Kids Iowa recipient.
After visiting the Urbandale food pantry in July, State Representative Larry McBurney posted on Facebook that the governor’s Healthy Kids Iowa program was “failing Iowa families.” Excerpt from his post:
Governor Reynolds claimed the program would provide “healthy and kid-friendly” foods through monthly distributions. But the reality on the ground is very different.
At the Urbandale Food Pantry—one of the largest in the state—families do not get to choose their food. Instead, the Food Bank of Iowa delivers pre-packed pallets with food determined by Iowa HHS guidelines. Families are required to take what they’re given with no substitutions allowed—even if the items conflict with their dietary needs, health conditions, or religious practices.
Here’s what I found in the boxes:
– Only beef as the meat option, excluding families with religious or dietary restrictions.
– Wheat-based items like traditional pasta, pancakes, and bread—completely unusable for children with gluten allergies.
– High-sodium, processed foods like Chef Boyardee that contradict the promise of “nutritious” meals.
The logistics of this program are just as troubling. Urbandale receives just one allotment per week, while many rural food pantries receive one per month. That’s not enough to meet demand, and highly perishable items like eggs, pears, and avocados often spoil before families can access them—especially for those without reliable transportation.
Even large food pantries like Urbandale are struggling with inconsistent deliveries. Some days they receive too much of one item, other days not enough. Today, clementines that were expected never arrived—and there’s no system to replace or adjust for missing food. Families simply go without.
Pantries are also being asked to take on even more responsibility without any additional support. Volunteers must repackage HKI food separately from all other donations, as required by Iowa HHS. That means more hours, more stress, and no extra funding to cover it.
After just one month of operation, it’s clear that Healthy Kids Iowa is not a serious substitute for SUN Bucks. Iowa families are receiving less food, fewer options, and more obstacles—while our food pantries bear the brunt of a poorly designed system.