California students will benefit from new school meal program
Deadline to participate has been extended to August 31
Published: July 29, 2014
Too many children in California begin their school day hungry. Hunger not only impacts their health and development, but also their ability to learn and succeed in the classroom.
At the California School Board Association, we advocate for effective policies that advance the education and well-being of California’s more than 6 million school-age children. A new initiative called the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) represents one such policy that could have a positive impact on ending childhood hunger, ensuring that every student thrives at school. The deadline for districts to sign up has been extended to August 31.
CEP will allow more than 900 qualifying high-poverty California schools to offer all students breakfast and lunch at no charge this upcoming school year. Because meals are free to all students at the school it eliminates the stigma associated with students receiving a free or reduced-price meal, and it helps struggling families make ends meet. A district also does not necessarily need to have a high population of students from low-income families to implement the program.
CEP also streamlines meal programs by eliminating the need for school meal applications. Some educators fear that eliminating applications will result in a loss of income data about their students, which is important because California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) targets funds to schools serving concentrations of low-income children. Typically, schools rely on school meal applications to determine which children are low-income. Schools that don’t collect meal applications must still collect and report student income data in order to receive the LCFF funds.
For the 2013-14 school year, the California Department of Education developed a new
form, available in 11 languages, to help schools gather the income data they need. A number of districts used the form successfully and undertook great efforts to collect the information, but sought relief from having to collect the data each year.
That relief was granted as part of the recently enacted 2014-15 budget. Once a school district collects income data for a child attending a CEP school, the income data can be used for that child for four years. The same policy applies to schools participating in another federal option to offer meals at no charge to all students, known as Provision 2. CEP schools will still have to collect income data and maintain a current tally of which students are low-income, but doing so will be easier because they will not have to obtain data from the same families every year.
The new policy will make it much easier for high-poverty schools to obtain the increased funding that the LCFF promises and adopt community eligibility to ensure that their students can concentrate and learn at school.
As California’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction wrote
in a letter to County and District Superintendents and Charter School Administrators earlier this year: “[Community Eligibility] will have a positive impact on your schools and families, thereby creating healthier communities.”
Nearly one in five California children lives in a household that can’t afford enough nutritious food. If we are serious about ending childhood hunger in California, we must encourage all eligible districts to sign up for this tool by the deadline of August 31. It’s also important to note that while children from low-income families skip breakfast more often than their peers, in fact many kids do not start the day with a healthy meal.
Join CSBA in spreading the word to local school districts about this tremendous opportunity to make sure all students have enough to eat so they can be even more successful in the classroom. For more information, please visit the
CDE’s website.