All Kansas kids deserve access to meals at school to ensure their future success. Access to school meals for students leads to improved health outcomes, better test scores, fewer school absences, and less behavioral referrals.
In Kansas, almost half of students receive free and reduced priced meals, meaning their families make less than 130% of the federal poverty guidelines for free meals, and less than 185% for reduced priced meals. These meals are a lifeline for many Kansas families, ensuring kids do not go hungry.
Still, many children who depend on school meals are unable to receive them due to barriers like cost and limited eligibility for meal-assistance programs. In Kansas, many kids experiencing hunger and food insecurity are not able to access critical programs that provide much needed nutritious meals and ease the financial burden for their families.
With 1 in 5 Kansas kids facing food insecurity, we must do all we can to ensure Kansas kids can thrive– now and in the future.
School districts where CEP is not viable can eliminate families’ co-pay for reduced-priced meals. Additionally, this could be implemented as a statewide effort. The USDA allows states and districts to subsidize the family’s portion of the reduced-priced meals so students who qualify for reduced-priced meals would receive meals free of charge.
Covering the cost of reduced-priced meals for all eligible kids in the state would increase the number of children with access to free meals by 17 to 24%.
The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a federal program that districts must elect to adopt. It provides free meals to all students in any school in the district with a 25% or more identified student percent (ISP).
The state of Kansas can also take measures to ensure more Kansas kids receive school meals at no cost through CEP. These include:
Lunch shaming is, “The practice of embarrassing students whose meal accounts have a negative balance.” The actions often overtly identify, isolate, or embarrass a child due to negative balances. These include taking away a meal from a child, giving the child an alternate meal, denying a child a meal, having the child eat elsewhere, and restricting a child’s extracurricular participation.
In 2023, Kansas Appleseed looked into school meal debt practices across Kansas. Our findings showed that only 4% of school districts have documented policies that allow students to continue to receive the same meal as their peers without being overtly identified as unable to pay through an alternate or no meal.
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