There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
My message today has to do with the annual data collection that our schools do each year to determine students’ eligibility for Free and Reduce Lunch (FRL), and why it is so important to us that each family complete the application document. In addition to ensuring that families who need it have access to affordable meals for their children during the school day (the primary reason), there is another use for this data that affects the basic eligibility for, and allocation of, Title I federal grant money.
Some of my readers will not be interested in the longer explanation that follows, so let me summarize upfront: completion of the Application for Free and Reduced Price School Meals that came to you in school packets this year may have important financial implications for your family, and for your child’s school. If you haven’t done so yet, please fill it out and send it back to school. If you can’t find the form, you can download it here. You only need to do this once each year. If you have already filled out this application when you registered your child as a new student this year, or you did it when you got the school packet last week, THANK YOU. This reminder is for anyone else who hasn't done it yet.
Understanding School Lunch Eligibility
Every one of the schools in CCSU offers breakfast and lunch to its students when school is in session. Whether, and how much, students pay for these meals depends on a family income-based calculation prescribed by rules set by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Vermont Agency of Education (AOE). The rules and their outcome, on a student by student basis, ultimately determines whether each family has to pay for their child’s meals, pays a reduced rate for the meals, or receives them for free. Eligibility can vary widely across the seven schools, in part reflecting the socio-economic profile of the community served by the school. When all of the individual eligibility determinations are made, the number of children eligible for FRL is converted to a percentage (e.g., an individual school might have 52% FRL eligibility, and each school has its own FRL percentage).
Because it is a federal program, there are nuances and complexities that are beyond the scope of my purpose today. Most schools base their charging for meals on whether a particular student is eligible for FRL – meals are free or reduced price if the student is eligible, and parents pay the full meal rate for their students if the family is not eligible for FRL. Some schools (Cabot and Twinfield) have for years provided free breakfast and lunch for all of its students, under a separate provision for eligibility that is difficult to qualify for initially and subject to review in subsequent years.
Everything I have said so far is based on “typical practices.” Little about life in our schools can be described as typical since we entered the world of COVID-19. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, starting with school closure in March, continuing through much of the summer after a brief break, and restarting again when school reopened, the schools in CCSU have been providing free breakfast and lunch to all students regardless of their eligibility for FRL. This has been possible because the USDA, in the interest of ensuring some level of food security during the pandemic, issued waivers to its rules to allow schools to feed all students, no charge, no questions asked. The latest waiver – an extension of the Summer Meals Program – was put into effect on August 31st, but this waiver is scheduled to be retired on December 31st (sooner, if USDA funding runs out). Assuming the money lasts until the end of the year, but absent any further action by Congress to provide additional funding to the USDA for the school lunch program, when we return to school after the Christmas break we will be “back to normal,” so to speak, in terms of the charging practices for school meals.
It's Data Collection Time
In the school year packets sent home over the past two weeks, you should have found a document titled 2020-2021 Application for Free and Reduced Price School Meals – VT Agency of Education. The good news is if you have more than one student living with you, you should only need to fill out one form (there is room to identify five students). In addition to identifying students living in your home, the form also asks for income information for the family. This is information that some families are reluctant to share. I get it, but for obvious reasons the information is critical to the calculation of eligibility. The information collected on this form is maintained in the strictest confidence.
So, even though we are now in a period where all students are eligible for FRL, that will not be the case forever, and it may change as soon as December. Once the latest waiver expires and we go back to the usual process of charging for breakfast and lunch, the decisions regarding who to charge, and who not to charge, will be based on the eligibility of each child as determined by the 2020-2021 application. Completing this form now will save all of us from an awkward situation later this year regarding charging families for meals that should continue to be provided free or at a reduced rate.
FRL Ratio and Title I
The second use for this data has to do with the poorly understood process of Title I eligibility for each school district. Title I is a federal education block grant program. The US Department of Education describes Title I as, “. . . [a way] to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high quality education and reach, at minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.” Embedded within that definition is the general recognition that family income levels have a direct impact on the ability of students to be successful in school, so Title I seeks to provide additional resources to our schools to improve learning outcomes. In most cases, we use Title I money to pay for additional instructional resources (e.g., interventionist teachers and extra programming). The determination of whether a school is eligible for Title I funding is based on the FRL ratio for each school.
A simple example would be this: If the school has 100 enrolled students, and 55 of those students qualify for FRL, the school’s FRL ratio for Title I eligibility is 55%. Under Title I eligibility guidelines, a particular school’s FRL ratio must be 35% or higher to qualify; if it is 34.9% or less, the school does not qualify. We are in the process of recalculating FRL eligibility through our start of year data collection – those forms! – for all of our students, and by extension, the FRL ratio for each school.
At present, all of the schools in CCSU except Peacham School meet the eligibility threshold for Title I. I have placed a table at the end of the newsletter showing the current allocations of Title I money in the six CCSU schools that are currently eligible.
We need to have accurate data to calculate the FRL ratio, and that data comes from the Application for Free and Reduced Price School Meals that we ask all families to complete. It is important for all families to complete this form, even if you think you are not eligible for FRL. In recent years, our return rate has been as high as 95%, and as low as 60%; for the missing 5% to 40%, we know we have a mix of students who would be eligible if they applied, and students who would not be eligible, but we have no way to determine the impact of this missing data on the Title I eligibility calculation.
Summary
We want families who are eligible to receive free or reduce priced meals for their children to get those discounts whenever the Summer Meals Extension expires. As important, we also want to be sure that we have accurate data for the AOE to use when they set the eligibility for Title I again later this year. A loss of Title I funding has a direct and significant impact on your school’s budget, because Title I money is typically used to pay for instruction that we cannot simply drop when the Title I funding goes away. In other words, the lost Title I money has to be made up through local tax revenues.
If you found all of the above explanation a bit mind-numbing, welcome to my world. I have tried as always to distill information into a form that is easily understood – this newsletter challenged that goal for me. I hope the next newsletter will be simpler and lighter.
Mark Tucker, Superintendent
Caledonia Central SU
p.s. I usually get a dozen or more replies to my newsletters. I am happy to hear back from my readers, but sometimes your questions are best answered at the school level. So, if you are replying with a question, please tell me your child’s school so I have context for your question and can easily redirect it if appropriate. - Mark
