BACKGROUND: Participation in the US Department of Agriculture's summer meals program is consistently lower compared to National School Lunch Program (NSLP) participation, even though the programs target the same population of children. The purpose of this study was to elucidate reasons for participation and nonparticipation in the summer meals…

The US Department of Agriculture runs a large array of farm and food subsidy programs. The school lunch and breakfast programs are two of the largest, which together with related school food programs will cost federal taxpayers an estimated $35 billion in 2025. Thirty million children, about 58 percent of students in public schools, receive school…

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…

During the U.S. post-WWII recovery, appropriations for school lunch became codified in the 1946 National School Lunch Act, fueling program growth in the baby boom era to 18.9 million participating children by 1967, or about 42 percent of 45 million enrolled students. Then, in 1968, two reports funded by the Field Foundation of New York highlighted…

The federal child nutrition programs provide assistance to schools and other institutions in the form of cash, commodity food, and administrative support (such as technical assistance and administrative funding) based on the provision of meals and snacks to children. The programs provide financial support and/or foods to the institutions that…

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the federal law-enforcement agency with primary responsibility for enforcing immigration laws within the U.S. However, for over a decade, ICE has formed partnerships that also allow local police to enforce immigration law (i.e., identifying and arresting undocumented residents). Prior studies, using…

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 next President of the United States has an enormous responsibility--and opportunity--to provide an equitable foundation for a new generation of learners. The magnitude of the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated the importance of schools as community anchors that children and families rely on for much more than an education. This document…

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), like No Child Left Behind before it, requires states to report information on the academic achievement of students in each of their schools, both overall and for various subgroups of students. A subgroup of particular interest to policymakers and researchers is economically disadvantaged students,…

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended life for students, teachers and everyone connected to public schools. The crisis has also exposed the fragilities of the economy in meeting the basic needs of all and highlighted the importance of the public sector, of community, and of care work. Schools are key public spaces of community and care. They must be…

The federal government devotes roughly one-sixth of its spending to 10 major means-tested programs and tax credits, which provide cash payments or assistance in obtaining health care, food, housing, or education to people with relatively low income or few assets. Those programs and credits consist of the following: (1) Medicaid; (2) the low-income…

Healthy students perform better. Poor nutrition and inadequate physical activity can affect not only academic achievement, but also other factors such as absenteeism, classroom behavior, ability to concentrate, self-esteem, cognitive performance, and test scores. This toolkit provides information to help make schools the model for healthier…

This paper estimates the effects of participating in the National School Lunch Program in the middle of the 20th century on adult health outcomes and educational attainment. I utilize an instrumental variables strategy that exploits a change in the formula used by the federal government to allocate funding to the states. Identification is achieved…

Background: Food service directors have a concern that federal reimbursement is not meeting the demands of increasing costs of healthier meals. The purpose of this article is to report the food option changes and the annual revenues and expenses of the school food service environment. Methods: The HEALTHY study was a 3-year (2006 to 2009)…

The history of the school lunch program is laden with the political wrangling and compromises that usually beset massive government initiatives, and as with other government initiatives, the results of the wrangling and compromises have tended to be sadly durable. The school lunch program has consistently been viewed and managed not primarily as a…