If you’re paying full price for your child’s lunch in the school cafeteria, you’re in the minority. As the school year starts, about 22 million children will qualify for the free and reduced-price lunches doled out daily in cafeterias around the country. That’s nearly 72% of all the lunches served in schools that participate in the lunch program.
What began as a $70 million program in 1947 has exploded into an $11.6 billion give-away as of fiscal year 2012, according to the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the program. It has nearly doubled since 2000, when the program cost $6.1 billion.
In a typical day last year, more than 30 million children got federally approved lunches in 100,000 public and private schools. To be eligible for a free meal, families must say they have income at or below 130% of the poverty level ($31,525 for a family of four this school year). Those with incomes up to 185% of the poverty level ($44,863 for a family of four) are eligible for reduced‐price meals that can’t be priced higher than 40 cents.
The US Census says that the poverty rate is about 16%. So if you double it, you would have about 30% of school kids getting a free lunch. So why are 72% of lunches free or reduced price? People cheat. But as more and more families qualify for benefits, who’s left to complain? And a behemoth government bureaucracy that spreads into every small town and big city in America looks the other way. After all, who wants to deny any child a healthy meal?
Back in 1969, 2.9 million students received free and reduced-price lunch, compared with the 16.5 million who paid full price. So back then 85% were paying their own way. The following year fewer than 80% were paying full price and a year later it was down to 74%. That number has been shrinking ever since. It hit 50% for the first time in 1982.
When President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, 40% of lunches went to kids paying full price. In 2014, it was down to 28.4%.
So how did it get to that point? Parents are pushed to apply for free lunches from the federal government on behalf of their children. Even if you know you don’t qualify, the schools demand that you sign-off and get counted. It’s common knowledge in the playground that no one at the school is going to figure it out if you leave off your child support payment or don’t include the income from your second job. The more money a district collects on behalf of its students from the federal government, the more money the state then kicks in. The incentive is to look the other way.
Applications are taken at face value and income is rarely verified. Parents don’t have to turn over tax returns or pay stubs or give any proof of how many people live in the household. Only a maximum of 3% of applications are required to be audited. Federal guidelines tell the school districts not to explore the other 97%.
Naturally, there’s bound to be scams. The kids themselves know how to work the system. At my son’s public high school, where about half the students got free or discounted lunches, the “free-lunch kids” often sold their meals for $1. This was especially common during Ramadan, when the Muslim students were fasting during the day.
The New Jersey state comptroller found “widespread fraud” in the lunch program of 15 school districts after a newspaper investigation discovered that some members of the Elizabeth school board and district employees had not reported income in order to get free lunches for their children. The 109 criminal referrals in the state investigation in 2013 included 40 school employees and six elected school board members. One board member from Pleasantville told the investigators that her income was “none of (the district’s) damn business.”
A similar investigation in Chicago public schools in 2012 turned up a dozen false lunch applications from school and city workers at just one high school. The school board's inspector general found that "fraud is being committed by high-level and highly paid CPS administrators and that the lucrative federal and state benefits tied to the forms drives the fraud."
The U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report in May 2014 that called for the agriculture department to impose additional verifications to prevent fraud. The report came about when the USDA estimated that it had school lunch certification errors of more than 8%, or $996 million. Of the 7.7 million approved applications in 2010-11, the GAO took a closer look at 25. It found that 11 of them should not have been approved.
