Congressional Republicans are reportedly considering spending cuts to balance the cost of extending the tax cuts they enacted in 2017. One proposal is to raise the eligibility threshold for the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which lets schools provide federally reimbursed free meals to all students. This change would cut the number of…

Colorado's Healthy School Meals for All (HSMA) program provides free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of economic background, and aims to strengthen farm-to-school systems and school food service workers' pay. After unexpected increases in student participation, the program faced a significant budget shortfall that raised warning…

This study investigates the implementation and impact of the community eligibility provision (CEP) in Maryland schools. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a federal school-based meal service option that allows high poverty schools to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students at no cost. CEP was introduced over the period 2015 to…

This report summarizes findings from the School Meals Operations Study (SMO), part of an ongoing series to assess school meal operations on a school year (SY) basis. This volume of the study covers July 2021 through the end of September 2022 and includes SY 2021-2022. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, the Families First Coronavirus…

Purpose/Objective: To describe the perceived benefits and barriers to move beyond Community Eligibility Provisions (CEP) and initiating Universal Free Meals (UFM) in all districts across the U.S. that choose to participate in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and School Breakfast Program (SBP). Methods: Cross-sectional survey conducted in…

We study the private market response to the National School Lunch Program, documenting economically meaningful spillovers to non-recipients. We focus on the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), an expansion of the lunch program under the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Under the CEP, participating schools offer free lunch to all students. We…

The federal government has a long history of investing in programs for feeding children, starting with federal aid for school lunch programs in the 1930s. Today, federal child nutrition programs support food served to children in schools and a variety of other settings. This report starts with an overview of child nutrition programs' funding…

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is the Nation's second-largest food and nutrition assistance program, providing billions of meals to tens of millions of children and adolescents each year. USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS) periodically reports on NSLP policies and program operations, often after major changes to the program's rules…

Abstract Households with children eligible for Free School Meals are at risk of food insecurity. This paper reports on a rapid-response study that investigated the impact of the school food voucher scheme during the COVID-19 crisis on young people, families and schools. It pays close attention to the reliance of the state on the goodwill of…

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 allows school districts to provide free meals to all students if over 40 percent of them are directly certified as free-meal eligible. While emerging evidence documents positive effects on student behavior and academics, critics worry that CEP has unintended…

The child nutrition programs support meals and snacks served to children in schools, child care, summer programs, and other institutional settings in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories. This report starts with an overview of child nutrition programs' funding structure and then provides detail on each program,…

FNS Research Corner provides a continuing series to summarize recently completed and current research conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in the area of Child Nutrition Programs (CNPs). Summaries of recently completed research projects and in-progress research are provided in this article.

The Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT) program was launched as an effort to address the loss of access to free and reduced-price school meals due to widespread school closures at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As schools reopened in a shifting mix of fully virtual, hybrid, and in-person formats and families lacked consistent access…

The federal government has a long history of investing in programs for feeding children, starting with federal aid for school lunch programs in the 1930s. Today, federal child nutrition programs support food served to children in schools and a variety of other institutional settings. The child nutrition programs support meals and snacks served to…

The National School Lunch Program's (NSLP) original goal was to help students in need, but policy changes in the past decade have made students from middle-income and upper-income families eligible for federally funded school meals. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), an expansion of the NSLP enacted in 2010, effectively created a federal…