Budgets are a fact of life. We try our best to balance our income with our expenses, and hopefully if we’ve done it right, we have a little left over to save for a rainy day. It’s not always cut and dry. But the decisions we make — the way we decide to prioritize where we spend our money — can have major repercussions on our lives and those of our children. Do we skimp on health care and spend extra money on a fancy car? Do we make room in our budgets to eat well?

Similarly, the way we balance school budgets affects how we prioritize school food. Yet school food finances are handled in a way that’s substantially different from other departments in most school districts. Academic departments, such as math, science, history and language arts, are all paid for by a district’s general fund, and most of us would be shocked if we were asked to pay for these pillars of public education. In addition, districts cover the cost of basics such as recess, buses, nurses and custodians. Just imagine if we had to pay an additional cleaning fee to get our school floors swept, mopped or vacuumed?

[See: 10 of the Biggest Health Threats Facing Your Kids This School Year.]

The school meal program, on the other hand, is expected to be self-sustaining, if not profitable. So we assume school districts will supply our children with clean floors, buses and nurses, but not with food? In essence, we’re saying that to learn, children need to be in clean buildings, be transported to and from school and have health care providers on-site, but that healthy food is not a priority.

Now let’s imagine that school meals were actually viewed as one of the pillars of the educational experience. Glimpsed through this lens, a lack of healthy school food would be considered as detrimental to a child’s learning experience as no math class or school buses, or trash overflowing in classrooms.

But school meals haven’t historically been seen in that light. In fact, oftentimes it’s just the opposite. For decades, school meals have been treated first and foremost as a moneymaker for schools, and then as a last resort, a break-even department. Faced with this bizarre financial situation, rising food and payroll costs and stagnant revenue, school meals have over the years become more and more processed, unhealthy and detrimental to our children’s ability to learn.

[See: ‘Healthy’ Foods You Shouldn’t Be Eating.]

This decline in the quality of school food might have been avoided if it was just given the same respect as academic departments. If food services departments weren’t mandated to stay budget neutral or show a profit, then they could focus on serving the healthiest possible food, just as academic departments focus on providing the best possible education.

This month, the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act became a full year overdue. Not only are our elected officials seemingly incapable of passing a law to protect our kids’ meals, but they’re resisting making the law stronger. While the election year frenzy whirls around us, I’d like to challenge each and every one of you to tell your elected officials to pass a strong reauthorization bill, and beyond that, to start thinking about a future in which our country prioritizes healthy school food as highly as academic curriculum, buses and clean floors.

[See: 10 Healthy Meals You Can Make in 10 Minutes.]

If we want to ensure children are healthy today, tomorrow and into the future, then we must demand access to healthy food for all kids. To do that, we’ll have to make school food a budgeting priority.

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Balancing School Budgets to Make Food a Priority originally appeared on usnews.com