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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

USDA free-lunch program expanding to all 50 states; deadline for schools to apply is June 30

Over the past three years 11 states -- Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, New York, Ohio, West Virginia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland and Massachusetts -- participated in a program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture that provided free lunches to students in more than 4,000 schools with a high percentage of their students in poverty.

The Community Eligibility Provision program is expanding for the 2014-15 school year, adding all qualifying schools in the U.S. Are your schools eligible? Have they applied? Do they plan to? The deadline for new schools to apply is June 30. For more information from CEP, click here. For state-by-state statistics, and a link to a list of qualifying schools, click here.

The program has proven successful in participating states, Education Week reported last year. It serves 372 schools and 152,669 children in Kentucky, Anna Baumann writes for the liberal Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, encouraging more schools to participate. Some have been reluctant because of potential financial ramifications.

In South Carolina, 657 high-poverty schools will be eligible for the program in the fall, reports The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg. Sue Berkowitz, director of the Appleseed Legal Justice Center, told the newspaper that more than half of public schools in the state qualify for the program, and 20.4 percent of its households with children lack access to adequate food. (Read more)

"In Minnesota, 39 school districts are eligible to participate for all schools in their district," Kim McGire reports for the Star Tribune. "USDA officials estimate that about 138 schools could benefit, or about 57,300 students." More than 50 schools in Vermont qualify for the program, Angela Evancie reports for Vermont Public Radio.

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