California schools may be required to provide kosher and halal meals

California schools may soon need to provide halal and kosher meal options for students.

Dubbed the Halal and Kosher School Meals Act, a proposed bill in the California Legislature would require schools to provide kosher or halal meals if more than 5% of their students request such.

Both kosher and halal meals follow specific Jewish and Islamic dietary practices, respectively, for how food is prepared and served. For kosher meals, dairy and meat cannot be mixed, and only certain animals can be eaten. Halal requires animals to be slaughtered in a particular way and does not permit the consumption of pork products.

Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, said every student, no matter religion or culture, deserves to feel “supported and included at school” and his bill is one way that schools can do that.

“Kids shouldn’t have to choose between hunger and adhering to their religious beliefs,” Newman said. “This bill creates a more equitable system for students who observe halal or kosher dietary practices.”

“When suitable meals aren’t available for these students,” he said, “they often have to go without eating at school, something that is fundamentally unfair and clearly detrimental to their educational experience.”

For Shaykh Mustafa Umar, the senior religious director of the Islamic Center in Irvine, the bill is personal.

Umar’s children attend an elementary school in the Newport-Mesa School District. There have been times when his children would bring lunches from home so they wouldn’t have to worry if their meals at school were halal. When they don’t bring meals from home, they skip eating at school and just have a later meal at home.

“It has always been a struggle when it comes to food and public schools,” Umar said, adding that he is “extremely happy” to see such a bill that considers both Muslims and Jews.

“It hasn’t been easy,” he added. “Teachers would often say all the food is halal if there wasn’t any pork being served so the kids would get confused and tell me the teacher and the lunch lady said the food is halal when it actually was not. That was pretty frustrating.”

Umar had to teach his children how to explain halal to adults, which is “a lot for a second grader to take on.”

“I wish it wasn’t that way and they could just have good, healthy, halal options where there is no confusion,” Umar said.

The proposed bill, should it pass, would take effect in the 2025-2026 school year. If at least 5% of a school’s students request halal or kosher options, the school would need to provide them. If less than 5% request alternative options, a school could still provide those options but would not be mandated to do so.

The bill allows school districts or schools to survey students for their meal preferences, however they deem best.

Rabbi Dov Wagner, director of the Chabad Jewish Student Center at USC, said the bill would open up meal options for all students, something that has been tough for children in the past.

“Without access to kosher and halal meals, students are often put in a situation where they have to choose between their education and their religious traditions and heritage,” Wagner said. “That is an unfair choice to need to make.”

“All other students are being provided with meals that meet their dietary needs,” Wagner said. “Jewish and Muslim students deserve the same.”

California’s education code requires public school districts, county offices of education and charter schools serving students from transitional kindergarten to twelfth grade to provide two meals free of charge during each school day to students requesting a meal, regardless of their free or reduced-price meal eligibility. If a child is vegan, gluten-free or has any other allergies, they will be given a meal that fits their dietary needs after discussing them with the school.

But there are no standardized policies for providing meals tailored to a person’s diet for religious purposes, Newman’s spokesperson Brian Wheatley said.

“For students that keep halal or kosher, they were either limited to cherry-picking specific items from the cafeteria, bringing meals from home or, worst case, not eating at all,” Wheatley said. “We had testimony from one student that said that if she didn’t arrive in the cafeteria early enough, everything she could eat was gone.”

Just how much the bill would cost schools is not yet known, said Wheatley.

The bill will need to get the OK from the Senate Appropriations Committee to progress; a hearing has been set for Monday, April 29. It recently passed unanimously out of the Senate Education Committee.

Source: Orange County Register