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Tennessee launches its summer food benefits this week. Most students in the state will miss out.

Staff photo / A box of groceries are seen in a cart at Chattanooga Area Food Bank's Foxwood Food Center on Nov. 7, 2023. The majority of low-income Tennessee students will miss out on summer grocery benefits for the first time since 2020 after the state refused federal funding for the program. Instead, Tennessee is launching a much smaller program, which advocates warn will hurt food insecure families across the state.
Staff photo / A box of groceries are seen in a cart at Chattanooga Area Food Bank's Foxwood Food Center on Nov. 7, 2023. The majority of low-income Tennessee students will miss out on summer grocery benefits for the first time since 2020 after the state refused federal funding for the program. Instead, Tennessee is launching a much smaller program, which advocates warn will hurt food insecure families across the state.

By Melissa Brown / Chalkbeat Tennessee 3 min read

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

For the first time in five years, the majority of low-income students across Tennessee will not receive supplemental grocery funds this summer to help bridge the months when they aren’t receiving school meals.

Tennessee this week will send one-time $120 payments to an estimated 25,000 low-income students in 15 counties to help pay for summer grocery costs. Tennessee’s largest counties, including Hamilton, are excluded from the program.

The program is a significant rollback of Tennessee’s previous summer food benefits initiative, which served an estimated 700,000 students across the state each summer since 2020 with the help of a state-federal partnership.

That program, known as summer EBT or Sun Bucks, ended this year when Gov. Bill Lee declined to continue the partnership, effectively rejecting an estimated $75 million in federal funds that provided the summer grocery benefits.