Syracuse district restarts free summer meals for children Monday
Free breakfasts and lunches return to Syracuse children Monday, with school and neighborhood sites meant to bridge the summer hunger gap for working families.
Free breakfasts and lunches will return to Syracuse children 18 and under at school buildings, parks and neighborhood sites Monday, giving families a weekday food source just as school cafeterias close for the summer. The Syracuse City School District is running the meals Monday through Friday, and children do not have to be enrolled in summer school to take part.
The district’s site list stretches across the city, from Bellevue, Brighton Academy, Clary, Corcoran, Dr. Weeks, ELMS, Frazer, Henninger, Huntington, HW Smith, ITC, Lincoln, McCarthy at Beard, McKinley Brighton, Nottingham, PSLA at Fowler, Roberts, Seymour, STEAM at Dr. King, STEM at Blodgett and Webster to community locations including Atrium: Elite Gaming Arena, Boys & Girls Club Fayette, Bellgrove Missionary Baptist Church, Central Village, Eastside Family Resource, Mary Nelson and OnTech. Families can use Hunger Solutions NY’s map to find the closest site.
Syracuse City schools provide free breakfast and lunch to all enrolled students through the Community Eligibility Provision, and district food-service pages list more than 9,500 breakfasts and 11,500 lunches each day, along with about 1,500 suppers for after-school programs and high school sports teams. Last summer, the district operated meal sites at 36 different locations, including summer school programs, community partners and Syracuse City parks. The 2025 effort also involved the City of Syracuse Parks Department and the Food Bank of Central New York.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program offers no-cost meals and snacks at schools, parks and other neighborhood locations for children and teens 18 and under. The meals are meant to work alongside Summer EBT, which provides eligible children a $120 food benefit on an EBT card. Hunger Solutions New York counted nearly 500 sponsors serving summer meals at 2,500 sites across New York in 2024, more than 250,000 children eating summer lunch on an average day in July 2024, and only 1 in 4 low-income children eating summer meals that month.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
