School meals

By JEAN L. McCORKLE
jmccorkle@daily-review.com
MORGAN CITY — Donna Jones, cafeteria manager at M.D. Shannon Elementary, greets each student as they start their morning with her for breakfast.
Some ask what’s on the menu, others simply say, “hello.” Jones pauses in her position at the register to return a lost lunch bag or refill a tray of pineapples.
Of the 175 students enrolled at the pre-kindergarten through fifth grade school, Jones and her workers feed on average 120 students at breakfast and 160 at lunch. Being a Title I school, 92 percent of children at the school are on free or reduced lunch.
“A good breakfast means a lot. It helps students in class because you can’t learn well if you’re hungry,” Jones said.
Beginning this school year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture began offering the Community Eligibility Provision nationwide.
The program allows schools with high poverty rates to offer free breakfast and lunch to all students without the hassle of filling out forms at the beginning of the school year.
A school, or the school system as a whole, qualifies if 40 percent or more of its children receive the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or other federal income-based programs.
The state education department reported that as of today, 44 school districts are participating in the Community Eligibility Provision in some form. Out of those, 31 are providing free meals to every school in the district.
The federal program sounds fairly simple. It pays districts to feed students based on a USDA calculation. All students get to eat free, and the district has to deal with less paperwork.
The government will pay for all students who qualify for free meals, plus a portion of the students that have to pay for their lunch. The higher the poverty level of the school, the more money the school receives from the program.
Around 74 percent of St. Mary Parish students receive free or reduced lunch system-wide.
However, the catch to the program is that a non-federal funding match is required. In St. Mary Parish’s case, that amount would total slightly over $200,000 each month.
The program reimburses all of the students who qualify for free meals through its calculation, but provides a lesser reimbursed amount for students whose lunches could be covered by the family. Thus, a portion of the cost of some of the meals would have to be picked up by the school system.
School Food Service Supervisor Mary Grimm-Howard told the St. Mary Parish School Board recently that it cost an average of $3.76 to produce each lunch in the 2013-14 school year. Free lunches were reimbursed last year at $3.01. The average cost for breakfast was $1.88 with reimbursement at $1.89.
Had St. Mary Parish opted into the program, the system would have been eligible to claim only about 80 percent of meals at the free rate with the remaining 20 percent being claimed at the paid rate, meaning the school system would receive only 30 cents for 20 percent of lunches that cost over $3 each.
The school lunch program costs the school district $6.2 million annually.
As breakfast wraps up at the Morgan City elementary school, Jones says that even for parents who are middle class and have several children in the school system and have to pay for lunches, “it’s a struggle, and it’s cheaper to pack lunches (than pay lunch money) but they’re sometimes not as healthy as what we provide,” Jones said.
How area school districts compare
No school districts in the region are participating in the Community Eligibility Provision.
Parish enrollments and percentages receiving free or reduced lunch, as of February’s Louisiana Department of Education enrollment count, are:
—St. Mary, 9,117 students at 74.2 percent free and reduced lunches.
—Assumption, 3,795 at 66.2 percent.
—Iberia, 13,856 at 71.4 percent.
—Lafourche, 14,570, 60.8 percent.
—St. Martin, 8,200 at 75.8 percent.
—Terrebonne, 18,367 at 68.1 percent.