New York State Education

Hochul Unveils Universal Free School Meals Program: State of the State 2025

The governor also wants to make some community college programs free. But she didn’t touch the thorniest issue: the school funding formula.

Bianca Fortis · January 15, 2025

Governor Kathy Hochul estimated that free breakfast and lunch could save families as much as $1,600 per child per year. | Photos: Governor Kathy Hochul; Rawpixel | Illustration: Leor Stylar

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New York state’s 2.7 million students may soon have access to free school breakfast and lunch if a proposal by Governor Kathy Hochul makes it through this session’s budget negotiations.

Nearly one in five children in New York were food insecure in 2022 — up significantly from the previous year — and research shows that students underperform when they are hungry, the governor said during her State of the State speech on Tuesday.

“It pains me as a mom to think of little kids’ stomachs growling while they’re in school while they’re supposed to be learning,” Hochul said. “In the wealthiest country in the world, this can no longer be tolerated.”

Senator Michelle Hinchey and Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas have been pushing for a universal school meal program for the last three years, but the full proposal never made it through budget negotiations. The legislature did, however, provide funding to cover up to 90 percent of students, according to a representative from González-Rojas’s office

New York City, Albany, Rochester and Yonkers have their own universal free school meal programs. With President-elect Donald Trump vowing to reduce federal funding for school meals, a state program could fill in the remaining gaps.

Hochul estimated that free breakfast and lunch could save families as much as $1,600 per child per year. For the 2025-26 school year, the program is expected to cost $340 million, according to the governor’s office.

Among her other education-focused policy proposals, Hochul is also pushing to make community college free for students who enter certain fields, including teaching and nursing. The governor has also indicated that, as part of her executive budget, she will propose legislation to curb the use of smartphones at school, a move she has been considering for months.

Conspicuously absent from Hochul’s speech was any mention of the Foundation Aid formula, which the state uses to distribute the majority of funding to schools. During last year’s State of the State, she noted that New York had set aside $24.9 billion for the program, fully funding it for the first time since its implementation in 2007.

Last year, the state legislature also gave $2 million to the Rockefeller Institute to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the formula and suggest ways to improve it. The think tank released its final report in December, providing a list of recommendations that the governor and legislature can choose to implement — or not — during this year’s budget negotiations.

Clarification: This story was updated to include data provided by Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas’s office.

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Bianca Fortis is the education reporter at New York Focus. She was previously an Abrams reporting fellow at ProPublica, where she spent 18 months investigating how Columbia University protected a predatory doctor who had sexually abused hundreds of patients for more than 20 years… more

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