Free School Lunches Case Study

School boards must request to establish a National School Lunch Program through their State child nutrition agency, and any public and non-profit private school may do so and take part in the program. Certain standards must be met to be eligible for free or reduced-cost school lunches, and all students are allowed to take part in the program as long as they meet the requirements. Basically the criteria to be considered eligible for free or reduced-cost school lunches are established by one of four different classifications.
The first one is called categorical eligibility, which all children in this classification may be given free school lunches. These are mainly children who are homeless, migrants, in the Head Start Program, or are in foster care and can be certified by through direct certification by the agency responsible for the child and the school district in which the child is attending without a paper application being filled out.
Any student that lives in a home which is receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is to be directly certified due to a nationwide requirement to all school districts regardless of their location.
The third classification is dubbed community eligibility which grants schools that have forty percent or more of their students which are directly certified under the eligibility criteria for this program to receive free school lunches to offer free school lunches to all of their students.
The fourth and final classification is the income-based eligibility, which means that if a student is not eligible by any of the other three classifications then the student’s parent or guardian must fill out a school lunch application and turn it in for consideration based on the household