American Community Survey for National School Lunch Program (NSLP) Claiming Rates

The Office of Research and Analysis (ORA); of Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) shall make a sole source award to the committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). NAS will examine the potential strengths and limitations of using data from the America Community Survey (ASC) or other data sources to establish small area estimates (school district/school) of the percentage of households with school-aged children below the eligibility thresholds for free and reduced-price meals. The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a federally assisted meal program operating in over 101,000 public and non-profit private schools and residential child care institutions. School districts that participate in NSLP receive cash subsidies and donated commodities from USDA for each meal they serve. The cash subsidies are much larger for those meals served to children certified for free or reduced-price meals. Any child enrolled in a participating school may purchase a meal through the NSLP. Children from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty level are eligible for free meals. Children from families with incomes between 130 percent and 185 percent of poverty are eligible for reduced-price meals (no more than 40 cents). Children from families with incomes over 185 percent of poverty pay for full-price (paid) meals at rates established by local school food authorities. In 2007, more than 30.5 million children each day received a nutritionally balanced meal. More than one-half of these meals were served to low-income children certified to receive free or reduced-price meals. Most students become certified for free or reduced-price meals based on applications submitted by their household to the school district. The district uses self-reported information from the application about the household size, household income, and participation in certain means-tested public assistance programs - Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP - formerly the Food Stamps Program), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), and Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). Students may also become eligible for free meals through "direct certification" which allows districts to use information from agencies administering certain means-tested programs to establish that a student is a member of a household participating in one of these programs and is thus eligible to receive free meals. In an effort to reduce paperwork and other administrative burdens at the local level, three alternative Provisions to the traditional eligibility determination and meal counts by type were enacted into law. The Federal regulations for Provision 1, 2, and 3 are found in 7 CFR 245, Determining Eligibility for Free and Reduced Price Meals and Free Milk in Schools. Most schools using one of these special assistance alternatives use Provision 2. Under Provision 2, schools operate a "base" year in which they serve all meals at no charge but use standard program procedures to establish individual students' free or reduced-price eligibility and count meals by eligibility category. The schools receive Federal reimbursement based on these counts in each eligibility category. In years 2-4 in a four-year cycle, schools make no new eligibility determinations and continue to serve all children meals at no cost. The school takes only counts of the total number of reimbursable meals served each day, instead of counting meals by eligibility category. Reimbursement during these years is determined by applying the percentage of free, recued-price, and paid meals served during the base year to the total meal count for the claiming period in subsequent years. In the early 1990's several pilot projects were conducted to test alternatives to the annual application and daily meal counting procedures in the NSLP. The intent of these projects was to test ways to reduce the administrative burden on schools with a large percentage of students from low-income families, while maintaining program integrity. Four of the pilot project sites operated no-fee programs, offering meals in some or all of their schools at no charge to all students. These school districts developed claiming percentages based on enrollment and applied these claiming rations to total daily meal counts to develop their claims for Federal reimbursement. The School District of Philadelphia was one of these pilot sites. They developed enrollment-based claiming percentages by combining information about households directly certified for free meals and information from a socio-economic survey designed to determine if a household was eligible for free or reduced-price meals. Claiming percentages were established for all schools in the district and a no-fee program was implements in all schools in the district with 70 percent or more students eligible for free meals. The FNS appreciates the challenges associated with collecting and reviewing free and reduced price meal applications, particularly in large school districts. There is significant interest in alternative methods of developing claiming rates for reimbursement in the NSLP and SBP that are less burdensome to school districts than the customary method of applications. FNS is amenable to exploring and evaluating other potential alternatives, including using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) or other data sources to establish small area estimates (school district/school) of the percentage of households with school-aged children below the eligibility thresholds for free and reduced-price meals. It would be extremely beneficial to have an alternate, independent, systematic, and reliable data source for school-level poverty measures. Ideally, FNS would like to obtain a less burdensome alternative to applications processing that uses extant data to produce reliable annual estimates of the percentage of families with school-aged children and family income at or below 130 percent of poverty, between 130 and 185 percent of poverty, and over 185 percent of poverty for every school in the country. FNS would like to gain a better appreciation of the technical and operational issues associated with using a combination of data from existing surveys (e.g., the American Community Survey) and/or administrative records (e.g., number of directly certified students) that can provide direct estimates of sufficient reliability, timeliness, and quality for poverty estimates in small areas such as school districts, groups of schools, or individual schools.