Free school lunch plan abused, study says

Food for thought: It’s easy to get a free lunch in a Lawrence public school.

A new government-commissioned study says more than one-fourth of children in the National School Lunch Program would be rejected if applications were placed under greater scrutiny. The idea that more than 700 of 2,600 students in the Lawrence public school district’s program may be ineligible because family income is too high is starting to raise eyebrows locally.

“There is definite room for improvement,” Paula Murrish, the district’s director of food services, said Tuesday. “No school district food service director would argue that point.”

The issue surfaced while the Lawrence school board revisited its decision to waive a wide range of new student fees based on a family’s participation in the federal lunch program.

Board members had agreed to exempt from the fee increases in 2002-2003 the 2,600 children in the program.

A committee of secondary school principals and district administrators objected to the financial consequence of an exemption covering more than one-fourth of the district’s students, arguing that enrollment in the lunch program was inflated.

The new study for the U.S. Department of Agriculture by an independent research firm, Mathematica Policy Research, indicates lunch rolls were 27 percent higher than they should have been in 1999, the latest year for which data were available.

The board didn’t back down on the waivers, but members did express interest in putting a lid on inappropriate acquisition of free- and reduced-price lunches.

Horrified

“I was horrified that they had that big a number,” board member Jack Davidson said.

Vice President Scott Morgan said disclosure of the presumed financial misconduct should have been brought to the board’s attention long ago.

“We didn’t hear about it until we were doing something they didn’t want us to do,” Morgan said. “If this was a concern people had, I would have expected it to come by itself, not as an argument to overturn board action.”

Davidson and Morgan said they support the free lunch program, but they want it administered right.

Murrish said the district had 1,805 students in the free-lunch program and 806 students in the reduced-price lunch program at the end of March.

Until this school year, Murrish said federal law obligated the district to accept all information on a family’s application on “face value.” Each applying family was admitted if it claimed to meet income-eligibility guidelines  no proof required. For a family of four, the cutoff this year is $22,945 annual income for the free-lunch program and $32,653 for the reduced-price lunch program.

Better system needed

Murrish said the federal government attempted to get a handle on fraud by authorizing school districts to question items on a family’s application. For example, the district can ask for a paycheck stub to verify income. But, in reality, there’s still no detailed evaluation of applications, she said.

“We need to find a method to be more responsible,” Murrish said.

She said a better system would require hiring administrative staff  an unpopular move while the Lawrence district contemplates $4.7 million in budget cuts and fee increases.

Meanwhile, Murrish suspects many Lawrence families eligible for the food nutrition program don’t apply.

“I would say that for every child enrolled who ought not be there, there is a child who should be but isn’t,” Murrish said. “And when that happens, it’s … the kids that suffer.”