For decades, the federal Free and Reduced-Price Lunch (FRL) program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been used as a proxy to identify economically disadvantaged students. Participation in that program has been limited to students from low-income families, defined as those earning below 185 percent of the federal poverty line. FRL has been widely used in state school funding formulas and accountability systems to identify at-risk children.
But in 2010 Congress enacted two changes that made more students eligible for the program's benefits, but reduced the quality of FRL participation as a proxy for poverty.
The first, known as Direct Certification, allows students who receive other forms of public support such as food stamps to be eligible for FRL. The second change, known as Community Eligibility, allows schools with at least 40 percent of students identified as eligible for FRL through direct-certification-type means to provide free lunches to all their students.
[For more on this story by Rachel Grich, go to https://www.future-ed.org/how-...n=cb_bureau_national]
Comments (0)