It's Children's Week at the Capitol. Thousands of colorful hand cut-outs hang down the open floors of the Rotunda. The man behind the yearly spectacle – Ted Granger, executive director of the United Way of Florida – is gearing up for a make-or-break week on bills that would help kids.
"Florida's children today are struggling. The children and families", said Granger. "We're still coming out of the Great Recession. We're in a moribund economy."
28.4% of Florida children go hungry at some point during the month, compared to the national average of 21.6 percent.
The Reverend Pam Cahoon is executive director of CROS Ministries in Palm Beach County - which runs food pantries and other programs to feed the hungry. One is an after-school snack program.
"There were just a lot of discipline problems, and so we started getting groups to provide sandwiches for the kids after school – and the discipline problems went away", Cahoon said. "Those kids were just hungry."
CROS also sends backpacks of food home for the weekend, because teachers were seeing hungry kids on Monday morning. Granger says he knows lawmakers have a tough job sorting out everyone's needs.
"From our point of view, the most important infrastructure is the human infrastructure. If we don't have a solid human structure, everything else doesn't matter", said Granger.
Granger, Cahoon and other children's advocates will visit lawmakers this week with that message.