A greater number of students appear to be eating meals so far this school year with a free breakfast and lunch program now in place, the Philomath School District’s director of finance and operations, Jennifer Griffith, told the Philomath School Board last week.
“Our food service and nutrition with all students eating free — that has exploded,” Griffith said. “I just pulled the numbers to compare to last year the first nine days of this year and we have (served) over 1,100 more breakfasts and 1,200 more lunches.”
The Philomath School District this year was accepted into the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Community Eligibility Provision program, which allows all students to receive free meals without requiring families to fill out applications for aid. Benefits include lowering family food costs, increasing food security and reducing the social stigma for students who are eating free or reduced-price meals.
The federal program keeps the free meals in place for the next four years. Griffith said the school district can choose to reapply every year to try to extend it out an additional year or simply reapply after the four years are up.
According to the USDA’s description of the program, participating schools are reimbursed using a formula based on the percentage of students who are normally certified for free school meals, without an application.
“There’s a fair number of schools and districts that have gotten it and the whole part of it is not so much that Philomath’s poverty level has risen … but that the USDA cutoffs have dropped significantly in terms of the poverty levels that are their thresholds,” Superintendent of Schools Susan Halliday said. “So between that, it has made a lot more people eligible.”
Kings Valley Charter School applied and received the grant as well to make free meals available to those students, Halliday said.
Griffith said that with the increase in the number of students served, more supplies are needed and that in turn equates to more food storage space. Griffith, who said she had spoken earlier that day to the district’s food services director, Scott Harper, mentioned that they had just looked at a new freezer for the high school.
“One of his concerns was that before when they did a lunch, they could use a partial case for a meal and now they’re using at least one if not one-and-a-half cases, so they have to order two for each meal and … they just need space,” she said.
Griffith said the district is also keeping an eye on staffing levels.
“But because the meal count is increasing, our claims will be bigger and we should bring in some more revenue to cover all of that,” she said.
