Free school lunch for every child in Shelby county, Memphis

Original article on NationSwell.

A bologna sandwich: that's what students of Shelby County Schools in Memphis, Tennessee, got for lunch if they forgot to bring the roughly $2 to pay for their food.

Nothing: that's what some impoverished students — 80 percent of the district qualifies for free lunch — would rather sit with in the cafeteria than be revealed to their classmates as the "poor kid."

"We see kids every day that don't go through the lunch line because they don't want to be identified as that kid who gets a free meal. That stigma is huge," says Tony Geraci, the executive director of Shelby County Schools' nutrition program.

But the district moved to change that. Shelby County Schools began serving three meals to every single student — breakfast, lunch, and dinner — all for free, regardless of family income.

The change came through a federal program that rethinks how school-lunch reimbursements work. Instead of judging each family against the poverty line, the government now looks at the economic well-being of entire districts. Known as the "community eligibility provision," it kicks in once 40 percent of a district's population is considered low-income — largely based on food-stamp signups. Reimbursements are then doled out based on how many meals a cafeteria serves, not on how many poor kids attend the school, creating an incentive to serve more meals.

The evidence behind the idea is old and strong: nutritious meals correlate with academic performance. A 2002 study led by a Harvard Medical School professor found that students "at nutritional risk" missed more days of school and showed more anxiety and aggression — problems that improved within six months once a free breakfast program was in place. The difference between a kid who pays attention to the teacher and one who focuses on an empty stomach often falls along economic lines.

America's subsidized school lunch programs date to World War II, when many young men were rejected from the draft because of the physical consequences of childhood malnutrition. The National School Lunch Act of 1946, passed as a "measure of national security," was expanded in 1998 to cover snacks in certain after-school programs. The latest expansion, created by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 and rolled out nationwide for the 2014 school year, goes further still — and is part of First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign against childhood obesity.

Memphis is not alone: Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, parts of New York City, and other districts have adopted community eligibility too. Beyond removing stigma for children who would otherwise qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, it catches the ones who fall through the gaps — students whose families never filed the annual paperwork, those just above the poverty cutoff, and the growing number of homeless youth. For several kids, a healthy meal at school is the only real meal of the day.

"Kids won't be going home and saying, 'I'm hungry,' and their mother just says, 'I don't have anything for you to eat,' and not enough money to go to the market maybe," one Baltimore student, Adria Johnson, said when her district qualified. Altogether, nearly 6.4 million students across 13,800 districts are fed under the expanded rules. In Memphis alone, parents were expected to save $1.8 million they had previously been paying for lunches.

"Stigma really overshadows a lot of the great things we do," Geraci says. "For once, we'll be able to have a program where we can say, now it's time to learn, now it's time to eat, now it's time to play. That's huge for this district."