The price of your child’s “free” school lunch? About $166 million.

And the cost could rise even higher. There’s talk of asking the state’s voters for more tax dollars to shore up Colorado’s school lunch subsidy — just two years after voters agreed to a tax hike to pay for the current program.

As reported last week by The Gazette, the backers of the “Healthy School Meals for All” initiative on the 2022 statewide ballot apparently low-balled how many kids actually would line up for free grub. It’s not that they had failed to account for all the low-income households whose children the program would serve. Rather, they didn’t anticipate how many kids from middle- and even upper-income homes would participate.

That’s right; what voters actually approved two years ago was free breakfast and lunch for all children attending Colorado public schools. That’s around 900,000 pre-K-through-12th-grade kids. All are eligible, regardless of household income.

It’s unclear why the program’s authors — including advocacy group Hunger Free Colorado — wanted the taxpaying public to underwrite school lunch for the well heeled. You’d think the objective would be to serve households that are needy while letting parents on a firmer financial footing reach into their own pockets to cover the cost of a PBJ and an apple.

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But there’s no mystery as to the program’s cost overruns. Give something away, and plenty of people are likely to take it. About 60,000 schoolchildren were expected to participate. But as a state official told The Gazette, it turned out some 184,000 students ate a free breakfast and 435,000 ate a free lunch daily during the past school year.

So, it’s no surprise the actual cost of the program in its first year outstripped its projected cost by more than $50 million. The Legislature had to step in with a stopgap, tapping the state’s operating budget. Now, some want to go back to taxpayers for a long-term bailout — to bridge what promises to be an ever-growing funding gap.

The program’s dubious premise gets even more curious when you consider that truly needy kids already were being served free lunch on Uncle Sam’s tab. Fully 41% of Colorado’s public schoolers were eligible for either free or reduced-price school meals under the National School Lunch Program.

So, why expand school meals to include children from households that can afford to punch their own ticket?

Maybe most voters went for it in the last election because it increased taxes only on households earning more than $300,000 a year to foot the bill. A solid 55% said yes then, and at least one poll reported by The Gazette suggests voters would support another tax hike for the program.

Perhaps the reasoning is, “Those folks can afford it.”

Then, why give their kids free food?

Surely, no one is suggesting cafeteria food tastes better than home-cooked for the majority of families that can afford it. Or, that middle-class parents are simply too busy to ensure their kids don’t go hungry. If those parents are OK with fast food, they can make that call, too, when they shell out lunch money.

So, why pay their way?

How about a ballot proposal to dismantle the entire boondoggle, instead? It could require the Legislature to backfill any shortfall in federal school-meal funding for low-income households — and let all other households pay their own way.

Presumably, our progressive Legislature wouldn’t balk at feeding poor kids — even if it meant cutting less essential state spending to cover the tab.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board