Скачать или смотреть Having issues with your P EBT meal money card You're not alone

To learn more about The Alabama Education Lab and receive notifications about stories and events, sign up for its newsletter, Ed Chat. Parents throughout Alabama are reporting issues getting promised food money aid. Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) payments for eligible children who didn’t receive school lunches because of virtual or hybrid learning began rolling out the week of June 7 for meals missed in the August-December 2020 semester. But many parents have faced difficulties in either getting their P-EBT cards in the mail or getting the correct amount. Hundreds of people have posted in the Facebook group Alabama Benefits who say they received incorrect amounts, did not receive cards at all or who are asking questions about how the process should unfold.“More attention should have been paid to this process and our kids should have been valued more,” said Sharie Jackson, whose two daughters attend Bessemer City High School. “People say it’s free money, but at the end of the day it’s money we need to feed these children.”Students who receive free and reduced-price meals or whose schools participate in the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) are eligible for P-EBT, as well as children under the age of 6 who are enrolled in SNAP. The program, which is funded by the U. S. Department of Agriculture and administered by the Alabama Department of Human Resources with assistance from the state Department of Education, provides each child with $6.82 a day for every day not in the classroom. Benefits are calculated on a monthly basis — students who were entirely virtual should receive P-EBT cards in the mail with a total of $615 for the fall term, while fully hybrid students should receive a total of $367. Read more: Hundreds of dollars of meal money in the mail. While there is a DHR hotline for parents with questions and complaints about P-EBT, many Facebook posts report long wait times and difficulty getting through. The hotline receives an average of 3,500 calls a day, according to DHR. Jackson opted for her children to learn virtually because of health conditions that made her more likely to get severely ill from COVID-19. But when her P-EBT cards came in the mail on June 21 and 23, she immediately realized both daughters only received the lower, hybrid amount. Jackson said she called the DHR hotline more than 11 times and never got through. On the twelfth try, she was placed on hold for over 30 minutes until someone finally took down her information, telling her they’d call back with answers in “three to five days.” When that time came and went, she called back and was told staff didn’t have any information for her. It is unclear whether errors are resulting from the USDA’s CEP designations, the department’s allocations, individual schools’ record-keeping, or some mixture of the three. Bessemer City is a CEP district, meaning schools serve free breakfasts and lunches to all enrolled students and all students automatically qualify for P-EBT.


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Article Link: https://www.al.com/news/2021/07/alaba...


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