Although the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the School Breakfast Program (SBP) help ensure that many low-income children have enough nutritious food to eat, some studies have suggested that the programs could be more efficient and cost-effective. In particular, concerns have been raised about erroneous payments that reimburse schools for…

Under the policy of direct certification for free school meals, school districts use information shared by state agencies about household eligibility for means-tested programs in the state in order to determine the potential eligibility for free meals of students enrolled in the district. This information allows districts to automatically approve…

Programs using means tests to identify low-income households face a trade-off between promoting access and ensuring program integrity. The authors use a comparison-district design to estimate the effects of a pilot program to improve the accuracy of the process of certifying students for free or reduced-price meals in the National School Lunch…

We used data from the School Nutrition Dietary Assessment III Study to examine the dietary patterns of school meal program participants and nonparticipants and the relationship between school meal participation and children's BMI and risk of overweight or obesity. School Breakfast Program (SBP) participants consumed more low nutrient energy dense…

This report, the third in its series, examined the implementation of the pilots, assessed their costs, and estimated their impacts on a set of outcomes designed to measure the success of the school meal programs in providing free or reduced-price meals to their target population without providing benefits to ineligible students. This report…

This report, the fifth in a serious of reports about the evaluation of the National School Lunch Program focuses on issues relating to applications for free or reduced-price meals. In particular, it presents (1) an impact analysis of the effects of the pilot policies on the number of applications submitted, and (2) a descriptive analysis of the…

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) sponsored the NSLP Application/Verification Pilot Projects to test ways to improve the process for certifying students for free or reduced-price meals. This report presents findings on the impacts of two alternatives to the current application based certification process--Up-Front Documentation and…

This is Volume II of the report on the evaluation of the NSLP Application Verification Pilot Projects. It supplements Volume I, which presents the evaluation findings. Volume II has two objectives: (1) to provide a detailed description of the methods used to conduct the study; and (2) to present tabulations that supplement and extend the analyses…