The Sulphur Springs Independent School District, Child Nutrition Department is announcing a change to its policy for serving meals to children served under the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program for DOUGLASS ECLC, BARBARA BUSH, BOWIE, LAMAR, TAVIS AND SSES for the school year 2019-2020. These schools qualify to operate the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) program and will provide breakfast and lunch to all children at no charge and eliminate the collection of meal applications for free, reduced-price, and paid student meals. This new approach reduces burdens for both families and school administrators and helps ensure that students receive nutritious meals.
jeff_ewing on August 27th, 2019 at 18:56 UTC »
In NYC we discovered that it is cheaper to do this than to have a whole regulatory scheme/means test. Just feed kids, irrespective of income.
sixstringhook on August 27th, 2019 at 18:32 UTC »
This needs to happen everywhere. I grew up extremely poor. Nothing makes a kid feel worse than not being able to eat with their friends and being hungry all day.
Edit because of questions asked/points made in comments* Where I went to school, they did have free and reduced price lunches for low income families, of which the majority of the time, I was on one or the other. The problem was, the cut off on income. I cant remember the exact amount, but if your family made even slightly over that, you were denied the free/reduced. Reduced price lunches were something like .45 cents? Regular price was $3.50. quite the jump there in cost. So making slightly over the lowest income to receive reduced price meals can be detrimental to a families income.
I will also add that I come from very small town midwest where there is a definitive stigma against anyone who asks for assistance, and while my family was never opposed to asking for help, I knew lots of others that wouldnt for fear of being ridiculed.
jedsaccount on August 27th, 2019 at 16:09 UTC »
Saw a story on yet another district wanting to cut off lunches for kids behind on payments and wanted to share this instead:)