Fairness issues

Concern about which students receive meal subsidies is just one of the difficult problems facing the local school district.

No one in Lawrence would want to take a meal away from a needy child, but it’s disappointing to learn that some local families may be abusing a program that provides free and reduced-cost meals to local school children.

Currently, 2,600 students in the Lawrence district are eligible to receive discounted or free breakfasts and lunches provided by the district. They became eligible because their families filed applications saying they met the necessary income guidelines set by the federal government. By federal law, the school district must accept that claim at face value; none of the financial information is checked.

The current guidelines provide free lunches for children who come from a family of four with an annual income below $22,945. Four-member families with incomes below $32,653 can receive reduced-price lunches for their children.

The last thing most local residents would want is for local school children not to be properly fed. A good breakfast and lunch helps a child get ready to learn. Most people would want the school district and the federal government to err on the side of providing meals to too many children rather than too few.

But the stakes have been raised this year by plans to institute various fees for school activities and bus transportation in the Lawrence district. To avoid placing an undue burden on low-income families, the Lawrence school board agreed that students who receive free and reduced-price meals would be exempt from the new fees.

The board’s move raised concerns from a committee of secondary school principals who objected to the financial consequences of exempting more than a fourth of the district’s students from the fee programs. They argued that the number of children receiving federal meal subsidies was inflated, a contention that is supported by a new government study that indicated more than a fourth of students receiving subsidized meals would be rejected from the program if information on applications were verified. That would amount to about 700 students in the Lawrence.

District officials were aware that the meal subsidies didn’t provide an exact measure of how many local school children came from low-income families, but they were the best tool the district had to determine who those children are.

The district’s food service director agreed there is “room for improvement” in determining what students should get subsidized meals, but it’s a difficult problem. For every unqualified child who receives subsidized meals, she said, there probably is another child whose family qualifies but doesn’t apply. Districts are authorized to ask for a paycheck stub or other documentation, but a detailed evaluation of applications isn’t done, she said. And doing such an evaluation might require additional staff that the school district can ill-afford to hire.

Given its current financial realities, the Lawrence school district probably should make some additional effort to direct meal subsidies and fee waivers to families that truly need them. No system including the honor system is likely to be 100 percent effective. No one wants children to go hungry, but the fee waivers raise additional issues of fairness for local students. It’s just one of the many difficult financial dilemmas currently facing our public schools.