Education Law

Adequate federal funding is needed to support child nutrition initiatives in our schools

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives is exspected to vote on the child nutrition reauthorization (S. 3307).

Despite good intentions to improve child nutrition, this bill has numerous new and problematic requirements that taken together could make it difficult, if not impossible, for school districts to successfully implement.

If S. 3307 is passed by the House, it will go to President Barack Obama as it has already been passed by the Senate.

A major concern with the bill is that the federal reimbursement for school meals is inadequate for most districts to cover the full cost of providing them. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports the full cost of providing free lunches exceeds the federal reimbursement currently by more than 30 cents per meal. While S. 3307 authorizes a 6 cents increase per school lunch for districts that voluntarily adopt updated federal standards for school meals, NSBA estimates the actual increased cost of compliance ranges from 11-25 cents per meal, thus increasing the reimbursement gap that already exists. Therefore, a school district serving subsidized lunches to 5,000 students has a potential shortfall of $270,000 under the current reimbursement rate. With the increase from S. 3307, an additional $54,000 could be added to a district?s shortfall.

BoardBuzz thinks that without adequate funding, schools could find it difficult to comply with the proposed new standards, reporting, training, administration, and other mandates.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on December 02, 2010 (boomark / email).