The Federal School Lunch Program

Introduction

The Federal School Lunch Program was a welcome move by the government when it first rolled out the countywide initiative back in 1946 (Pennsylvania Department of Education, 2012). The idea behind the program was to ensure that school going children get access to the best possible nutrition at school. This was especially true for those kids who came from a disadvantaged background in terms of resources and whose families could not possibly be able to provide the necessary nutritional intake with consistency. The advantages of the program were such that the government, in addition to providing nutritious foods that catered for all the dietary requirements of the children, had also devised quite a successive way of encouraging school attendance for the poor of the country. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was also able to benefit farmers by taking up the surplus harvest and directing the produce towards the school lunch program. However, since the inception of the program in the 1940s, the initiative has in the recent past had to deal with the challenges of the food quality, increase in obesity levels of school going kids, transportation, storage and general handling of the food among other equally pertinent issues. This research paper will delve into specific issues of the program, chief among them: Food security, the expenditure structure of the program, possible ways of further improving the program, and take an overview of how different states in the union are implementing the program.

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Background

In the US there was no school feeding programs in the offing throughout the better part of the beginning of the 20th century. This was unlike in the European continent where school kids were fed at lunch from as early as the 1700s (Levise, 2008). It was not until the onset of the First World War that individual states took it upon themselves to do something about general nutrition. During this period, early 1900s, America was faced with rampant starvation to such a point that nearly a third of potential enlistees to the armed forces for World War 1 were turned down due to malnutrition related diseases. According to social scientists of the time, the genesis of these diseases could be traced to chronic malnutrition and hunger during childhood that could also be linked to poor performance at school.

It is in the backdrop of such observations that linked malnutrition and hunger to poor educational performance that the superintendant of schools in New York rolled out 2 programs for feeding school kids at lunch hour in the early 1900s for a price of three cents. Other major cities such as Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Boston and Chicago were soon to follow and took the same approach to deal with the situation (Levise, 2008). All these efforts in the several cities were to the most part individually funded by philanthropic organizations, individuals, boards of various school districts and, other school associations among others. The reason was because at that time there was no federal or state nutritional program that was aimed at curbing the cases of malnutrition and child hunger within American schools.

1. Food Security Concept of food security

There exist several definitions of what food security is exactly. Among the several definitions that exist are: According to Mechlem (2004), the World Food Conference of 1974 defined food security is “the availability at all times of adequate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs that can sustain a steady expansion of food consumption in such a way that availability can offset fluctuations in production and prices.” Another definition that has been offered expresses the notion of food security as an individual’s ability to have access to food and be able to establish an entitlement to sufficient quantities of the said food. The definition that is used most widely, according to Melchem (2004), is that which was adopted in 1996 by the World Food Summit. It defined it as, “food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels is achieved when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”

All definitions aside, when it comes to food security the major concept is the correlation of availability of sufficient food in relation to the population (Melchem, 2004). Food security is mostly referred to in relation to the availability of basic foodstuffs and more so that of cereals. Cereals such as corn, wheat, rice and other grains are usually relied upon in determining food security because of their very high demand in the dietary needs of more than half of the world’s population. In the past the demand has always gone up in the face of the ever increasing populations as devastating droughts hit major producer countries. Normally the most organized of countries rid-out the drought due to their forward thinking which has seen them built strategic reserves for their grains. The importance of developing these reserves is that during years of surplus production, a certain amount of grains are stored in huge silos for use in harsher years. In order to keep the stocks within the required amounts, with each harvest, priority is given to the restocking of the reserve before normal commerce takes place. These countries that have strong policies regarding their food security such as USA are the ones that end up supporting the hunger stricken nations of the world in times of calamities and disasters (Melchem, 2004).

Food security or insecurity for that matter is a complex web to which most of the world is susceptible to, more so the poor. In times of world wide booms in harvests and flooding of the international markets with grains, effective demand still causes shortages in parts of the world due to their diminished purchasing power (Melchem, 2004). At times it is not the lack of funds that cause food insecurity but rather lack of access to supply. In places where natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and floods have occurred, transport and communication routes are cut off resulting in a large population being left with dwindling supplies as no more fresh produce or goods can reach them. As a result, children in these disaster-prone areas end up experiencing malnutrition and others suffering hunger and starvation similar to what people in drought prone areas or even places without sufficient food production experience.

Food security in America

When the topic of food security is introduced, many naturally associate it as a problem that is unique to the third world countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. True, these are the places in the world that are continually being faced with issues of lack of food, drought, natural disasters, hunger, conflicts that threaten livelihoods’ economic safety, and widespread starvation (Levise, 2008). The lack of adequate food due to climatic conditions and human error, be it conflict or poor fiscal management that result in poor harvests or lackluster storage of harvested food are among the major causes of malnutrition in these nations. When it comes to America, however, it is the mechanization of agriculture that has brought about food security.

Prior to the mechanization of agricultural practices in America, particularly in the early twentieth century, America was prone to food shortages that resulted to malnutrition among children and in some cases dietary related sicknesses and complications among adults (Levise, 2008). However, by the time of the great depression of the 1930s, America’s agricultural sector had witnessed tremendous transformation such that produce was in surplus. True, the diminished effective demand caused by the economic turmoil of the time may have been the major cause of the surplus farm produce, but still the plenty of food had shown that the developments in the agricultural sector were very capable of feeding the entire nation with plenty still left over for other needs, be it food donations to famine stricken countries or commerce in the international markets. In a sense, it is this boom in farm productivity that effectively ushered in the legislation of NSLA that was to eventually make the federal school lunch program a reality.

International efforts to deal with food security

Though the situations of food security, hunger, famine and malnutrition may have been effectively dealt with in America, Europe and most of the developed nation, these issues are still major stumbling blocks to the well being of a majority of nations in the world. It is because of the significance of the threat that issues to do with food pose to various nations that the United Nations via its various agencies has stepped in an effort to eradicate the lack of food or access to proper rations of nutrition in the food that is consumed. To this effect, between 1998 and 2000, according to Melchem (2004), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimated that 840 million persons were undernourished with a majority of them residing within the developing countries. In 1974, while focusing on global food shortages, the World Food Conference, according to Mechlem (2004) declared “every man, woman and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition.” It was due to the acute shortages of cereals and grains in the 1970s that FAO begun to encourage governments to beef up their strategic grain reserves via the implementation of policies that encourage the stocking and maintenance of food security in their countries.

Involvement of international organizations such as FAO, the UN and the World Bank has resulted in many nations, conventions and other international organizations adopting a “right to food policy” (Melchem, 2004). Food is seen as being more than a basic human need; this adaptation aimed to make access to food become a human right. The strong international backing for this right is based on the belief that if an individual has access to adequate food, he will by default have food security. Among the agencies that are strongly supporting the right to food policy is the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR). The greatest stride towards eliminating global hunger was taken in 1996 in Rome during the World Food Summit where a unanimous declaration was made to reduce by half the hunger levels in 2015 from the 1990-1992 levels. In 2000 when a special summit of the UN sat to pass the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the issue of food security and eliminating hunger in third world and developing countries was so crucial that it was included as the first goal of the MDGs to be achieved by 2015.

Conclusion

Food security is without doubt the first step before the implementation of any food and nutrition related policies in any country. The United States for instance could not have sufficiently managed to stick with its NSLP had there not been a surplus of farm produce in the 1930s. The high levels of mechanization in American farms coupled with modern farming techniques has ensured that America can safely feed it population of the poor and at the same time be able to help out starving populations worldwide in the case of a famine or any other disaster in which the victims may require food and nutrition.

2. Expenditure structure of the NSLP Federal funding

All funds of the NSLP come from the USDA through the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS). The FNS has the distribution of financial funds to various schooling institutions as its main function. The main criterion for determining the amount of federal grants that are distributed for lunch meals is based on not only the number and amount of the meals served but also on the type of the meals that were disbursed in a particular state in the fiscal year before. The type of the meal could be that at reduced price, paid lunch, breakfast, snacks, milk or even free meals. The summation of the amounts of the meal offered in the previous year is then multiplied by an arbitrary reimbursement rate that is federally set for any given meal type (Ralston et al, 2008).

To continue getting these federal grants to run the lunch programs, state government is required by the federal government to match federal contributions by 30% of the amount that the particular state was awarded in 1980. The net effect of keeping the matching funds at frozen 1980 levels is that states end up contributing minimally as compared to federal contribution in the program. In order to ensure that no state contributes more than the others, the USDA has devised a formula whereby the contributions of each state are a factor of their per capita income (Levise, 2008).

Calculations are done to see by how many percentage points the state’s per capita deviates from the national average and that negative deviation figure is deducted from the 30% contribution. For instance if the state of Colorado has a per capita percentage that is 4% below the average, then the USDA will require it to remit 26% instead of the 30%. In order to encourage food authorities that offer more free meals to over 60% of school students, the federal government pays two cents higher per plate of a free meal. A special incentive is also extended to those authorities that offer in addition to regular meals, commodity foods like fruits such as oranges and apples. Otherwise, the federal funds are used to directly reimburse the food authorities the amounts that they have spent on lunch meals via quarterly or monthly basis (Ralston et al, 2008).

For the period starting 1977 to 2011, the federal expenditure on NSLP has continually been increasing to correspond with the larger number the initiative has been serving but has also increased due to the rise in food prices from those of the 1970s to the current levels. In 1977 the total expenditure figure stood at $6.6 billion for the 26.3million students under the scheme to a 2011 figure of $14.4 billion per annum catering for 31.7 million school going children. The main driver for this colossal increase in expenditure figures has been an increased number of children under the fully subsidized and free meals category of the breakfast and lunch programs (Vallianatos, Gottlieb & Haase, 2004).

Food procurement

The procurement of USDA foods is mainly handled by two agencies under the USDA who advertise and initiate competitive bidding or contractually source foods from manufacturers directly on behalf of the individual states. These two agencies are the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) which is tasked to exclusively deal with the acquisition of vegetable, poultry, fruit, fish and meat products; on the other hand there is the other agency, the Farm Service Agency (FSA) which sources dairy products, peanut products, cooking oils and grains such as wheat and corn. There exists an elaborate distribution mechanism through which the AMS and

FSA distribute and donate the food materials in turn to the various state agencies such as local food programs via the ‘Food Distribution Division’ of the FNS. This distribution by the federal government accounts for only about 17% of the average requirements per state, the other 83% is independently procured by individual schools using their state guideline set about by the state’s education departments (Ralston et al, 2008). Schools may acquire these required foods by either directly purchasing from the distributors or even the manufacturers or could alternatively completely outsource the duties to Food Service Management Companies (FSMC). Whichever method is used, it is still the federal government that ends up footing the bill through federal reimbursements.

Reimbursement rates

The rates at which state education departments can reimburse suppliers of the NSLP are not fixed but are rather flexible rates that are calculated and updated at the start of every fiscal year. These reimbursements are consumer price index (CPI) based and are dependent on the value that a particular food has to urban consumers in relation to where it was sourced from.

Based on the 2010/2011 fiscal year reimbursement rates for the NSLP, in the category where providers where serving less than 60% free meals, the free meals attracted the highest rates at $2.72, reduced price meals at $2.32, paid meals at $0.26, while commodity foods where at $0.2025 and $2.82. Whereas in the alternative category where over 60% of the served meals are free, free meals attracted $2.89, reduced price meals at $2.49, paid meals at $0.28 and commodity foods at $0.2025. During the same 2010/2011 period, 70.4% of the federal NSLP funds were used to reimburse for the acquisition of snacks and lunches, 21.2% of the same funds were consumed by school breakfast programs, commodity foods on the other had accounted for

8.3% of the funds with the milk programs coming in last with a paltry less that a percentage point of the grants (Vallianatos, Gottlieb & Haase, 2004).

Rise in food costs

A major stumbling block in the enactment of proper expenditure practices in the delivery of the NSLP has been the impact of increasing costs for the food stuffs. Even though the federal government has tried to stabilize the prices of the commodities via ensuring and encouraging competitive bidding and procurement to ensure that education departments acquire the best possible food at the most competitive price, still challenges have continued to rise. It has been argued by experts in the field (Ralston et al, 2008) that it is the pressures associated with costs that have been barriers to improving food quality in the programs as it is a known fact that quality is that much more expensive. Apart from the cost of purchasing the food, another cause of the rising costs is that associated with the preparation of the final edible food. There are hidden costs such as the energy and manpower costs of presenting a well cooked meal for lunch. The hidden costs usually rise due to labor wage demands by the cooks and other wage drawing workers who are either directly or indirectly involved in the NSLP. The effect of these is that the federal reimbursement that is claimed at the end of the day does not cover the full cost of meal production, thus forcing state education departments to dig into a different fund for other needs in order to keep the NSLP running efficiently in that state. In an effort to recover the ‘lost funds’ as it were, school districts have over time passed the extra cost to food authorities in a bid to reduce the budgetary pressures of the program. Since these food authorities are normally commercial entities that the school districts have outsourced the responsibility to, when they are confronted by these costs increased costs, the food authorities have been alleged to compromise of the food quality they offer so as to protect their bottom line (Levise, 2008).

Conclusion

The federal funding for the NSLP has continued to rise over time since the 1970s up to the current levels of $14.4 billion in 2011. This has been a good thing as the rise in expenditure has mainly been due to the importance of the program in the nation as more and more school going children continue to get on board with the program. The federal and state governments do however have to do something with regards to the hidden costs that rise during the implementation cycle of the program. These resulting higher costs mostly come from complementary services that the fund has not factored in it reimbursement rates. Therefore in order to cushion against the effect of rising prices, reimbursement rate calculations should include more than just the CPI.

3. Improvement on the NSLP

The NSLA

It was not until the Great Depression in the early to mid 1930s that a definitive program of feeding school going children at school was devised. What made the federal government in 1936 to intervene was not a case of excessive malnutrition or starvation, but rather a method to safeguard the impact of the economic crunch on farmers. Here was a situation whereby millions of Americans faced hunger and starvation but due to the chronic unemployment, farmers had no place of selling off their produce (Federal Education Budget Project, 2012). So via the

‘Commodity Donation Program’ in 1936, the government was to intervene and eliminate the suppression of prices occasioned by the produce surpluses. Food stuff was taken by the truckload to feed children through lunch meals (Levise, 2008).

The US Congress went a step further in making the provision of meals in school permanent by enacting the “National School Lunch Act, NSLA” in 1946. President Harry

Truman was to subsequently append his signature and make the act into law in the same year. The main aim of the program according to the President was “to safeguard the health and well being of the Nation’s children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other foods” (Ralston et al, 2008). Ever since the enactment of the NSLA there have been many improvements to the program over the decades such that it has evolved to be number two largest government run initiative catering to the nutrition and food needs of several children both in terms of numbers and financial resources. By 2006, despite there not being a federal directive for all schools to be part of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), 94% of the nation’s schools were participating. The figures were also interesting with nearly 60% of the 5-18 year old school kids having at least a meal per week, with nearly half the number of lunch meals offered free of charge and 10% given at subsidized fees. In summation, the Federal government in 2006 used 8 billion dollars; which is roughly 17% of its total expenditure on assistance programs for nutrition and food to cater for 30 million American children (Ralston et al, 2008).

Trends in food program policies

Ever since the enactment of the 1946 NSLA, the notion of school feeding programs has taken a turn for the better. The first major step that was taken to smooth the operation of the NSLA was first taken in the early 1960s where by the NSLA was amended to transform its funding from that of a grant aid from the federal government into a reimbursement program that guaranteed lunchtime meals to school going children, with more emphasis on those from low income households. Subsequent legislation saw the Child Nutrition Act (CAN) combined with the school food programs into a single program under the USDA. One of the main objectives was to provide schools with the necessary funds to acquire equipment to use in the preparation, handling and general food service (Vallianatos, Gottlieb & Haase, 2004). Later on in 1968, there were rising concerns over possible hunger breaks in the US. These fears propagated increased political support towards programs of school feeding. These increased concerns paved way for the establishment of the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP).

In 25th January 2012 in an effort to continue to popularize the NSLP, Michele Obama, the first lady and Mr. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture were in Fairfax, Virginia to launch the ‘new standards for school meals’ that aimed to provide healthier foods for school children. These meal requirements were aimed at revolutionizing meal standards in the food programs in addition to being the most far reaching reforms in the sector for over 15 years which were also to improve the nutrition and health status of an upward of 32 million kids. These new standards are key components of the “Healthy, Hunger-Free kids Act” (USDA Food and Nutrition Service, 2012) which was personally spearheaded by Mrs. Obama and was signed to law by the President.

School milk program

The school milk program (SMP) is a strictly non-profit operated program that was first established in 1954 when Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) funds were used to bolster milk consumption and intake by young school going children, especially those in the public school sector. Ever since its inception, the program has evolved to cater for all children under the school feeding programs. Under the SMP, all participating schools receive federal reimbursement for every half-pint of milk that is given to the school going children. The program is now available to all American children who meet USDA guidelines and the sponsors and schools offering the program have the option of offering this milk to students during meal times at school (Levise, 2008).

School breakfast program

The SBP was a brainchild of the CAN and was enacted in 1966. Ever since then it has been a constant feature in the school menus of several schools across the country. By 2012, the SBP was being accessed by an upward of 8.5 million children (Poppendieck, 2010). Like all other school feeding programs in the US, it is available for all students. The SBP is also a reimbursement program which has largely been credited for increasing attendance in school, early morning performance and attention spans of children in the classrooms.

Conclusion

The NSLA was a great initiative by the Federal government as it ensured that the American government could effectively deal with feeding it population of the young. Were it not for the success of the NSLP, there could not have been other better and more effective school feeding programs such as the SBP, SMP or even the CAN. Now the only thing left is to ensure that these programs continue achieving their objectives while having the best nutritional effects on the health of students by maintaining high meal standards.

4. Implementation overview

The USDA in an effort to implement the NSLP has been cooperating with the various state education boards within all states in the union. The reason for this approach is because state educational boards have direct access and control of the various educational schools and institutions under their control and are best placed to implement as opposed to the federal government (Ralston et al, 2008). In order to get the best possible understanding on how USDA has been having immense success in implementing the measures of the NSLA in the various states, three different state education departments and boards programs are outlined in detail.