New report explores the landscape of school meal charge policies

Public schools, nonprofit private schools, and residential childcare institutions can participate in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and School Breakfast Program (SBP), which provide federally assisted meals through the USDA. These programs aim to offer healthy meals to students, leading to benefits such as improved attendance, academic performance, and food security. A new report in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier, explores the landscape of school meal charge policies, focusing on unpaid meal debt and its implications for children and their families.

While the US Department of Agriculture mandates that school districts implement policies addressing unpaid school meal charges, there are no specific federal guidelines dictating the contents of these policies. With the end of USDA waivers that allowed free meals during the COVID-19 pandemic, many students are accumulating meal debt due to rising costs, which can lead to practices like lunch shaming. The report highlights the need for clearer policies and additional research to address the impact of unpaid meal charges on students and families.

Lead author Albert Pan, BSPH, Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explains, “Because school meal charges are a concern at a national level in the US and have potentially negative implications for children, more research and guidance are needed on best practices and policies.”

North Carolina has 115 public school districts, with more than 600,000 students not eligible for free or reduced-price meals during the 2019−2020 school year. By the start of the 2022−2023 school year, the state had accrued $1.3 million in student meal debt. To gather data on these policies, researchers utilized Google to locate online school board policies from November 2021 to March 2022, downloading copies from each district’s policy manual or website as COVID-19 waivers for free meals were set to expire. Ultimately, they analyzed 103 meal charge policies using a structured data extraction tool to uniformly assess components such as unpaid meal charge limits, actions taken for unpaid debt, and the provision of alternative meals. This revealed significant disparities and gaps in communication about meal charges that could impact families struggling to pay.

This report expands the limited research on school meal charge policies, revealing notable similarities across the US and specific practices in North Carolina. A survey of 50 school districts across the US conducted by the Food Research and Action Center indicated that only 25% of school districts immediately provide alternative meals to students unable to pay, compared to 41% in North Carolina. Furthermore, while 10% of policies mentioned hiring outside agencies to collect meal debt, North Carolina’s figure was significantly higher at 63%. These findings underscore the need for clear, consistent policies and the potential benefits of universal school meal programs to reduce stigma and student meal debt.

Future research into the potential psychological damage that children may experience due to harmful unpaid meal charge policies could determine how meal debt affects students. Regular reviews of meal charge templates and collaboration with the organizations that developed them are recommended to ensure that the language used minimizes any negative impacts on children and their families. The findings may influence lawmakers’ approaches to school meal charge policies in the future, with federal legislation potentially addressing these concerns by restricting the actions school districts are allowed to implement.

Albert Pan states, “Providing no-cost school meals to all students has been shown to have numerous benefits in addition to preventing student meal debt, such as improved food security, diet quality, academic performance, and attendance.”