VICKSBURG - It didn't start out as an anti-poverty program and it was certainly not expected to extend tentacles into the basics of school finances, but that's what has happened.
Across America, the end of the school year means parents of 17 million K-12 students will be providing something they haven't provided their children on school days: lunch.
Or, in many cases, breakfast, a morning snack and lunch.
It has been another record year for the National School Lunch Program. The number of noon meals provided to children for free or at a reduced price topped the 5 billion mark.
The most interesting thing about this program is not its scope, but how it has evolved. At public schools - and the program is not limited to public schools - the more students who are qualified for the program, the more operational money the school receives.
In the aftermath of World War II, the nation had (1) tremendous food production capacity and (2) lots of orphans, single-parent households and joblessness due to postwar layoffs.
Rather than dump the surplus food, Congress in 1946 created a program to steer the perishable excess, especially milk, to schools.
Made perfect sense. Worked well.
Twenty years later, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 went into effect with this preamble: "In recognition of the demonstrated relationship between food and good nutrition and the capacity of children to develop and learn, based on the years of cumulative successful experience of the National School Lunch Program with its significant contributions in the field of applied nutritional research, it is hereby declared to be the policy of Congress that these efforts shall be extended, expanded and strengthened under the authority of the Secretary of Agriculture as a measure to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation's children, and to encourage the domestic consumption of agricultural and other foods, by assisting states, through grants-in-aid and other means, to meet more effectively the nutritional needs of our children."
Nothing about poverty there, but the 1966 act says later that service to poorer districts and those where students faced longer commutes should have priority. Nothing initially required households to qualify individually. That came later.
Today in Mississippi, which has a higher proportion of people living in poverty than other states, the first day of school "packet" of forms includes an application for free or reduced price meals during the school day.
Information about household size and income is to be provided to administrators.
For free lunches, the trigger is having less income than 130 percent of the federal poverty level. That's now $500 per week, or $26,000 per year, for a four-person household. For reduced prices, the trigger is $712 per week, or $37,000 per year. All income counts.
There are many Mississippi households falling below those levels. Any single parent with three children and who earns less than $12.50 per hour would qualify.
But median income for a four-person household in Mississippi is now about $48,000 - meaning half have more income than that and half have less. Yet, significantly, more than half of the nation's school meals - almost 60 percent nationwide and slightly more than 60 percent in Mississippi - are provided free or at reduced-prices.
What does that mean?
One conclusion could be that there's more than a little fudging on the forms submitted when a school year begins.
Don't the districts verify the information?
To answer the question with a question, why should they? Every student who doesn't qualify for the meal program costs the district money.
The Mississippi Adequate Education Program has been a headline-maker for years now. News stories about the MAEP often say allocations are based on "complex formulas" to balance district-to-district allocations. At least one of those formulas includes the percentage of students who receive free meals as a factor. The higher - and some districts have 90 percent or more - the better in terms of dollars flowing from the state.
The reason, of course, is that "poor" and "at-risk" are often seen as synonyms and, to carry the logic further, it is a tacit assumption that it costs more to educate low-income students.
MAEP is far from being alone as a program that uses free lunch participation as a multiplier for more money. It is seen as a conclusive indicator of greater need.
So far, no one has really questioned that. But in the meanwhile, it is kind of interesting that while poverty rates have been fairly steady, National School Lunch Program participation has grown from one of seven meals 40 years ago to three out of five today.
The savings to parents is not tremendous - about $300 per child per year. But the benefit to districts of having more and more children enrolled in the program is growing every year.
