USDA quashes "universal" free school lunches
The U.S. Department of Agriculture thinks there’s entirely too much brotherly love going on in Philadelphia and says it will shut down a program that for the last 17 years has been offering free lunches to all school children regardless of income. The USDA says it isn’t fair for Philadelphia to be the only city in the country with this program and henceforth kids there will have to fill out paperwork to prove that they do indeed meet federal eligibility requirements for free or reduced-price meals.
Janey Thornton, the USDA’s new head of nutrition programs, says the policy of doling out free lunches to everyone on a paperless basis is not only unfair to other cities, but isn’t supported by valid statistics. This latter argument now rings hollow with the finding that the Philadelphia school population has been studied not once, not twice, but three times since the program began, the last just three years ago.
The studies, which compare school enrollment records with state records of poverty program enrollment, find that with only slight variation about 80 percent of the 183,000 children in Philadelphia schools would qualify for free or reduced-price meals. That means that about 20 percent of Philadelphia’s public school students are being offered free lunches even though they wouldn’t normally qualify.
Thornton, former president of the School Nutrition Association whose selection to head the USDA’s nutrition programs was met with some disappointment because she came from a small school district in Kentucky and did not bring reform credentials to the job, has been quoted as saying that the statistical underpinnings for the Philadelphia program were “no longer accurate” and “completely out of date.”
However, the 2006 study (pdf) was conducted by a professional research firm, The Reinvestment Fund, with an assist from Temple University. The firm not only analyzed school enrollment but studied several different strata of student groups who were not directly certified as eligible for the program. Nearly 2,000 of these non-certified students were sampled in depth–including validation interviews with families, often not easy to reach, and often not English speaking–to arrive at what it called a statistically valid method for estimating the number school children who would qualify for lunch assistance.
From its study, released in August 2007, The Reinvestment Fund estimated that 79.6 percent of all Philadelphia public school children were eligible for free or reduced-price meals.
The USDA’s Thornton apparently has not specified what it was about this particular study that made it “no longer accurate” and “completely out of date.” She has suggested that Philadelphia adopt a program in use in New York that officials there say is unworkable. Others estimate that it could cost the school district in Philadelphia $1 million to return to a system in which students must fill out application forms, which can be quite burdensome for families in poverty and hardly seems to comport with the modus operandi of the new Obama administration.
Not only might many otherwise eligible children miss lunch if they cannot provide the proper paperwork, thousands of children who do not qualify for federal assistance but have been getting free meals over the last 17 years will have to pony up if they want to continue eating a school lunch. There is no congressional mandate for “universal” free lunches in schools. But the National School Lunch Program currently is before Congress for re-authorization.
Could there be some method to the USDA’s apparent madness? The timing of the move does seem propitious. Maybe someone is setting Janey Thornton up to look like a nattering scrooge. Or is USDA Sec. Tom Vilsack just trying to get Congress’ attention?
Perhaps we’ll be hearing more about Philadelphia as the legislative process unfolds.
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
Ed – looks like there’s a stay of execution on this. Public outrage for the win! Or stalemate, at least…
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/education/20090606_Pressed_by_Phila___USDA_to_continue_free_school_lunch.html
Emily, I saw the reports that the USDA had backed off. My own surmise at their announcement they were discontinuing the program was a gambit to get Congress to get behind it with more money, possibly even fund other universal feeding programs. Good for Philadelphia.