Since the onset of COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant rise in student absenteeism in the US and elsewhere. Meanwhile, food insecurity remains a persistent issue across the globe, including in the US. Food insecurity shapes students' immediate and wider contexts and may worsen school attendance. Applying ecological systems theory, we…

Background: The National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs reduce food insecurity and improve dietary intake. During the COVID-19 pandemic, school meals were provided to all children at no cost, regardless of income. This policy is known as Healthy School Meals For All (HSMFA). The purpose of the study was to examine the feasibility of a…

According to the Ethiopia Ministry of Education (2015), school feeding initiatives, such as feeding children in food insecure conditions, providing educational resources, and school meals are essential for supporting access to general education. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of school feeding program on the academic…

Free school meals provide support to vulnerable families in the Republic of Ireland. Funding is allocated as part of an anti-poverty strategy. An investigation was carried out to discover if the school meal could be used to provide nutritious scratch-cooked food as well as providing opportunities for increased socialisation and pedagogy. Food…

The latest round of fiscal austerity in Ghana has meant that the feeding rate paid to the service providers of Ghana's school feeding programme is both frozen and unrealistically low. Accordingly, service providers adopt discretionary coping strategies. This qualitative case study, therefore, explores the impacts of austerity on children's school…

Background: Schools are a promising site for influencing the dietary intake of children and adolescents. The US Department of Agriculture recently released flexibilities to requirements for whole-grains, sodium, and low-fat milk in schools who demonstrated difficulty meeting nutrition standards for school meal programs. The support of School…

Background: The National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs help to reduce food insecurity and improve nutrition. The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) enables high-poverty schools to offer breakfast and lunch at no cost to all students. This study examines associations between CEP and participation among students eligible for free or…

Background: School feeding programs' evaluation requires the measurement of food insecurity, a more objective indicator, within school in low-income countries. The Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF) uses subjective indicators to report school feeding coverage rates across many countries that participate in the global survey of school meal…

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 allows school districts to provide free meals to all students if over 40 percent of them are directly certified as free-meal eligible. While emerging evidence documents positive effects on student behavior and academics, critics worry that CEP has unintended…

In 2019, 135 million people in 55 countries were in food crises or worse, and 2 billion people did not have regular access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food. COVID-19 has exacerbated these hardships and may result in an additional 121 million people facing acute food insecurity by the end of 2020. Further, since the beginning of the…

The issue of school food and its role in the learning environment has been overlooked by educators, education researchers, and policy makers. This study uses observations and interviews in three high-poverty, urban schools to investigate how participants experience school food policy in their daily lives. Participants at all three schools believed…

The Trump Administration's rollbacks in nutritional standards for school meals have been the subject of much criticism and the basis for a lawsuit. Research into food insecurity and public school meal quality shows that food security and high nutritional standards are essential to any efforts to improve both school equity and student performance.…

Many students rely on school meals to meet their nutritional needs. Additionally, the economic impact of COVID-19 has resulted in more families needing assistance. The intent and purpose of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Child Nutrition Programs is to ensure access to meals for students in need. Meal service is expected to continue whether…

The Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT) program was launched as an effort to address the loss of access to free and reduced-price school meals due to widespread school closures at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As schools reopened in a shifting mix of fully virtual, hybrid, and in-person formats and families lacked consistent access…

During the U.S. post-WWII recovery, appropriations for school lunch became codified in the 1946 National School Lunch Act, fueling program growth in the baby boom era to 18.9 million participating children by 1967, or about 42 percent of 45 million enrolled students. Then, in 1968, two reports funded by the Field Foundation of New York highlighted…