There’s a new program that is being implemented this school year on a nationwide basis. As I understand it, if a school district has a single school with more than 40% of the students eligible for traditional “free lunch”, then the district can apply for an expanded program whereby all students in the district will receive free lunch. This is referred to as the “Community Eligibility” program. From the articles I’ve read, the primary reason for this new program is to reduce the stigma associated with applying for “free lunch”. As they believe that some kids are going hungry because their families are too proud to individually apply for the program.
This doesn’t seem to me to be a sound economic decision for our federal tax dollars. If 60% of families can afford to pay for some or all of their lunch costs, why would we now make the decision to just cover the costs for everybody? So people don’t get their feeling hurt? I understand that some kids fall through the cracks but a better way would be to provide some additional discretionary funding to schools to feed those kids that are identified as not on the program but not eating. This would be a lot less costly than just picking up the tab for the entire other 60%.
I remember many, many years ago when free lunch (or reduced price lunch) recipients were given a punch card to present at the cafeteria register. IIRC, free lunches had yellow punch cards. Reduced price kids had orange cards. It was plainly obvious to all students who qualified for those programs.
But there is a cheaper way to move away from such a system than paying for free lunch for all. Many schools already have gone to a swipe card system, often integrated with the student’s school id card.
Move the entire school lunch program off a cash based system for full pay, reduced price, or free lunch. Then all transactions can happen online or within the school office. Each kid swipes a card at the cash register. The balance is deducted or the free lunch given out according to ability to pay. Parents whose kids are on full pay don’t have to remember to hand over cash each morning - just top up online or send a check once a month.
If the feds want to help then let them help transition school districts to such a setup. It should be cheaper in the long run than paying for lunch (for how many years?) for many students who would not otherwise qualify.
The swipe cards seem to be an excellent idea, as long as they use the same type of card for everyone. I wish they could have issued all those punch cards in the same color years ago; there was no real good reason to color code them that I can see.
Cite? How much does it cost to just throw some extra lunches on the truck versus how much does it cost to hire someone to monitor the other kids and track their eating?
I would fully support feeding every child in America, including the ones who aren’t even Americans. I can’t think of a better use of taxpayer money, unless maybe paying for lunches for elderly people on social security. In order to pay for these lunches, I would fully support raising my taxes a bit and also cutting out the congressional expense accounts which allow them to rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free meals. (see here, for example).
it costs well in excess of 60% more to feed 60% more. This is because there is always administrative fees involved in the collection and distribution of taxes.
So unless you’ve invented a method of 100% conversion between taxation and expenditure this will ALWAYS be true. Multiply this inefficiency times thousands of schools and then more than double it for the extra (and unnecessary) 60%.
Now hand the bill to the next generation of children.
It is possible that it is cheaper to just give all students in certain districts a free lunch once you get past a certain tipping point of students on a traditional free lunch program rather than run segregated programs. The food itself is fairly cheap, administration of such programs tends not to be once you add up all the costs from top to bottom. You have to pay the bean counters, auditors, lunch room staff has to run two separate systems and the public still gets to bitch about the supposed inequality. All school lunches that I have experience with are subsidized greatly for everyone anyway. The students don’t pay directly for the facilities or staff and the charge even for fully paying students is usually fairly nominal (it was in the tens of cents range the whole time I was in school which was a while ago but not that long). The nationwide average today is a little over $2 per student per day.
I don’t know where you draw the line at the percentages of those that are on the free lunch program versus those that aren’t but I would be all for it if it saved everyone time and money in some school districts. It would be interesting to see the true costs of administering free lunch programs and the curve that shows where it isn’t economical to run parallel systems.
I think the electronic card system would be a great idea. We already load money onto our daughter’s account online so when she doesn’t take lunch she can just pay for it using her ID card.
My district went to all free lunches last year. But 88% of our kids are free or reduced lunch! and I am pretty sure the argument was that runnin paperwork and dual systems just wasn’t worth it for such a small percentage of the kids. I am pretty sure it’s districts like us that will qualify. . . The 40% thing is just the cut off for title I funding, and that’s the baseline to apply.
However, it also costs to process the applications AND to maintain all of the additional paperwork and audit trails. At some point, these balance out, and it may in fact be cheaper to skip the paperwork and feed more.
In my local district, certain schools will be part of this program next year (not the entire district). The schools selected all already have 80% or more (in one case, 97%) eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, and the administrative costs just of distributing, collecting, and processing the paperwork are not small.
Think of now much money we could save if we make kids pay for their own toilet paper! And they can chip in for utilities. Think of all the taxpayer dollars being wasted keeping freeloading kids warm.
Hungry or poorly fed kids are a problem for everyone. School lunches are well documented as being a generally good move.
I don’t actually care if it costs a 160% percent more to fee all the children than it does to feed some of the children. It doesn’t actually cost that much more but whatever. My point is that a) not feeding all the children and instead paying people to monitor them also has costs associated with it, such that this not a choice between paying some money and paying no money.
And b) that feeding the future generations is an excellent use of taxpayer money since well-fed students learn better than hungry students do.
And since you brought it up, I actually proposed two payment possibilities other than the Republican plan (ie hand the bill to future generations): 1. Raising taxes and 2. Take the money from the Congressional expense account fund (because why are Congressmen entitled to free lunches but children aren’t?) 3. “Slice a couple million off the F-35 budget” would also be an acceptable answer.
Really - any argument to the effect that we’re just too poor in America is completely bullshit given that we’ve got endless amounts of money to just piss away on defense spending boondoggles and Congressional perks.
You know what? I would even be on board with using the money for lunches as a form of farm subsidy with the government buying the meat and veggies from American farmers and the meals prepared and packaged all right here in the US. I think that’s a great idea.
Anyone who wants to argue that America is so sad and pathetic that we can’t afford to feed our children - that’s pretty much the most unAmerican spectacle I can imagine.
The PLATE lunches will be free but all the extra side stuff they sell won’t be. (Like pizzas, salads, burgers etc…) So now the stigma is going to be: Anyone who orders a plate lunch must be poor.
I am as economically conservative as they come and this isn’t necessarily true. I grew up with a whole family of teachers and school administrators. The administrative overhead to run dual programs can be enormous (keep in mind, these are government programs and I hate most of them at least as much as you do). It takes a whole hierarchy of reasonably paid professionals to run lunch programs in any school that extends all the way from the individual district to the state government. It is all subsidized to some degree anyway.
Keep an open mind because there really are some districts out there where there really are over 80% students on free lunch programs already. Does it really make sense to force all that administrative overhead to run separate programs in those cases? It may actually cost a lot more with no benefit to anyone. One of my core principles is to make everything as efficient and cost effective as possible and this may be one of those cases at least for some districts. I don’t care if someone making $1 million dollars a year moves into a really poor school district and doesn’t have to pay $2.50 a day for their kids lunch if accommodating them will cost everyone money overall. That is just counterproductive. If you don’t understand how that can happen, you have never worked in a government role or a corporate environment. Exceptions usually cost almost as much as the core goal so they need to be eliminated to make everything run efficiently.
Our school allowed kids to go to the office and buy an entire month’s worth of lunches and put it on a card. One that got a hole physically punched in it as the child passed thru the line. Now days they could surely have ATM type cards passed thru a reader. That way those eligible for free lunch nobody knew by their daily actions if their lunch was free or not. Nobody could steal your lunch money either. That was the base of the program if I remember rightly.
No, he said feeding kids who are already being fed by their parents is a waste of money. They are being fed by parents who can afford it.
However the argument is in districts where a large proportion of kids are already on free/reduced lunch, the administrative costs of the paperwork and to hire people to validate eligibility and track the kids is greater than the costs of the meals itself. You end up saving money by not bothering to track and oversee a stratified (free/reduced/full price) program.