Congressional Republicans are reportedly considering spending cuts to balance the cost of extending the tax cuts they enacted in 2017. One proposal is to raise the share of economically disadvantaged students required for a school to be eligible for the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which lets schools provide federally reimbursed free meals to all students. An increase in the eligibility threshold could reduce access to universal free meals for a significant number of schools and students.
Why This Matters
Enacted in 2010, CEP is a federal universal free school meal program that gives eligible schools the option of providing free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of students’ individual household incomes. Schools, groups of schools, or entire districts with identified student percentages (ISPs) of at least 25 percent are currently eligible to participate. The ISPs are the shares of children eligible for free meals through household participation in government assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or Medicaid. The ISPs also include homeless, migrant, runaway, Head Start, and foster children certified for free meals through means other than an application for free and reduced-price school meals. House Republicans are reportedly considering raising the ISP threshold to 60 percent, which would result in schools with ISPs below 60 percent no longer being eligible to participate in CEP.
Key Takeaways
If the House Republicans were to increase the threshold from 25 percent to 60 percent, universal free meals would end in at least 21,000 schools serving approximately 11.4 million students. The change would also result in the loss of CEP access for at least 18,535 schools serving 9.4 million students that were eligible but not participating in CEP.
Because participation in CEP varies widely across states, the proposed changes to eligibility rules will play out differently across the country. For example, more than 70 percent of students in Mississippi and West Virginia would lose CEP, as would more than 50 percent of students in California, Kentucky, and New Mexico. This change would play out somewhat differently in the eight states that have universal free meal policies statewide. The state government currently covers the cost difference between the federal reimbursements and the cost of providing meals, but increasing the eligibility threshold would increase the cost of statewide universal free meals policies for these states, as fewer schools will be eligible for CEP and the associated reimbursements.
Research shows that providing free meals for all students improves student perceptions of their school environment, with students feeling safer and feeling that school is a welcoming place. Though income-eligible students in schools that lose CEP would not lose access to free and reduced-price meals, students who are not eligible for free meals based on their participation in government assistance programs such as SNAP would have to fill out forms to access free or reduced-price meals. And these forms can underreport need because of the stigma associated with providing the form and are less likely to be representative of true need among older students.
How I Did This
I use 2022–23 school-level ISP and CEP participation data collected by the Food Research & Action Center and the Common Core of Data to identify which schools were eligible and which schools participated in CEP that year. I use these data to estimate how many schools and students were part of CEP that year at different ISPs, which enables me to estimate how many would lose CEP under the higher eligibility thresholds House Republicans propose. The data I use in this analysis are recent but pre-date the US Department of Agriculture lowering the eligibility threshold to 25 percent starting in the 2023–24 school year. As a result, the estimates should accurately capture the effect of changing the threshold from 40 percent to 60 percent but will understate the full effect of raising it from 25 percent to 60 percent (because schools in the 25 to 40 percent range were not individually eligible in 2022–23).
