Kayla Munecas, Contributing Writer
The bill that would allow Virginia university students to donate their unused meal plan credits did not pass the General Assembly this year. State lawmakers voted to continue debating the proposal in the 2027 session.
The bill was introduced by Sen. Danica Roem, D-Manassas, and would have allowed students to voluntarily donate their unused meal swipes to be distributed for use by other students at campus dining halls or on-campus food pantries, such as the VCU Ram Pantry, according to a previous report by The CT.
Roem was successful in establishing the “Hunger-Free Campus Food Pantry Grant Program” in 2025 to fund campus pantries and fight food insecurity. The new bill would have required universities to allow students to donate their swipes in order to remain in the program and receive grants.
Roem told The CT one issue lawmakers took with that part of the proposal was a perceived unfairness of students donating swipes their parents had paid for.
Roem feels that assertion assumes students have a traditional, nuclear family, middle-and-upper class path through college and ignores the many students who put themselves through college with grants and with alternative family structures.
“Then the next part of that is these students by and large are 18 years and older, they’re adults,” Roem said. “This is not for the government to police them about. Them choosing what to do with their meal plans, that’s their choice. And if their parent happens to pay for their meal plan, then that’s a conversation they can have with their parent.”
Bill died because of politics, not money, Roem says
This year, the proposal unanimously passed the Virginia Senate after deliberations, but failed to make it through the House of Delegates Appropriations Committee, a powerful legislative group which, along with its Senate counterpart, scrutinizes bills that would cost money to implement.
“We got out of the Senate, it then got into the House and that’s where House versus Senate politics came in,” Roem said. “It just went into the House Appropriations Committee and they were killing a whole lot of bills that day. Only two got out of the committee that day.”
Roem said she will continue to push the proposal in 2027 and attempt to get both chambers on board, and maintained that the problem is not how much the bill would cost.
“This deals with House versus Senate politics,” Roem said. “It got caught up with a lot of other bills. The House was making a stand on one thing while the Senate was making a stand on another thing. Each body was killing other members’ bills from the other body in the House Appropriations Committee or the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee.”
Students still support the proposal
All of the VCU students The CT spoke to supported allowing students to donate swipes. Many students already try to share their swipes with each other.
Unused meal swipes only last until the end of semester before becoming unusable. Some students noted that practice as wasteful and money out of their families’ pockets.
Chemistry student Meena Marrs pointed to a disparity between students who have many swipes left over and those without enough to finish out the semester.
Mechanical engineering major Mac Hodgens agreed that an official swipe exchange system would fix money losses from unused swipes, saying students should be able to do as they wish with credits they already paid for.
“I think a change they could make to this is, it would be fantastic if you could use two swipes at a time or as many swipes as you want,” Hodgens said.
Speaking to the argument that students could overspend on food without the cap on meal credit use, Hodgens said effective budgeting is a skill college students should learn either way.