Using American Community Survey Data to Expand Access to the School Meals Programs (2012) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 7-15
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From page 7... ...
are federally assisted meal programs operating in public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. The programs are intended to provide nutritionally balanced, free or low-cost lunches and breakfasts to students each school day.
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From page 8... ...
The act authorizes the Secretary of Agriculture to consider implementing the approach recommended by this panel for using estimates from the American Community Survey (ACS) and other data sources to determine reimbursement under a new universal freefeeding provision that reduces administrative burden compared with the traditional approach of taking applications and counting meals.
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From page 9... ...
The National School Lunch Act, signed by President Truman in 1946, officially authorized the NSLP, although funds had previously been appropriated for more than a decade without specific legislative authority. The 1966 Child Nutrition Act expanded the program and added the SBP on a pilot basis; 1975 legislation made the SBP permanent; and 1998 legislation expanded the NSLP to include reimbursement for snacks served to students in after-school educational and enrichment programs.
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From page 10... ...
School districts must also conduct verification studies of samples of applications to determine the accuracy of the information that was provided and the eligibility status based on that information. In addition, school districts, usually through their state education agency, are required to work with other program agencies to directly certify students who are categorically eligible -- that is, automatically eligible for free school meals because their families are enrolled in another assistance program, including SNAP, TANF, and FDPIR.7 The families of categorically eligible students who are not directly certified can also establish their eligibility for free meals by providing a SNAP, TANF, or FDPIR case number on an application.
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From page 11... ...
. Neighborhood and school contextual variables had significant effects on school lunch take-up and the results differed between high school and elementary/middle school students." As noted earlier, to reduce administrative costs and expand participation, federal regulations issued in 1980 permitted individual schools to use one of two special provisions -- Provisions 18 and 2 -- designed to reduce paperwork and administrative burden in the school meals programs; in 1995, Provision 3 was added.
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From page 12... ...
These estimates would provide "claiming percentages" by which USDA would reimburse school districts for providing free meals to all students attending specified schools. The charge to the panel states: The panel will consider the ability of the ACS to provide estimates for school attendance areas, built by aggregating sampled values for census 10For purposes of reimbursement, the percentage of identified students times 1.6 is capped at 100 percent.
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From page 13... ...
The Committee on National Statistics obtained input during the project as needed from the Food and Nutrition Board. STUDY APPROACH In addition to considering the issues explicitly identified in its charge, the panel examined the quality and comparability of administrative data concerning school district enrollment and percentages of students certified as eligible for free and reduced-price meals; compared the definitions of eligible students in the school meals programs against the combination of ACS variables that best approximates those definitions; and evaluated model-based eligibility estimates12 provided by the U.S.
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From page 14... ...
The panel also worked with the Census Bureau and NCES to obtain ACS estimates and standard errors prepared according to our specifications (see Appendix D) for public school enrollment and percentage of students eligible for free, reduced-price, and full-price meals for all school districts in the country and for schools with attendance boundaries in the case study districts.
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From page 15... ...
It addresses the evaluation of systematic differences between ACS estimates and administrative data and the reasons for these discrepancies. It considers the precision of the estimates and relates that precision to year-to-year variation that school districts might expect when using the ACS and to year-to-year variation as observed in administrative data (an indication of the variation in reimbursement that school districts experience now)
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