Starting with the upcoming school year, all students from pre-K to high school in Stroud Public Schools will be able to eat breakfast and lunch at no cost.
Superintendent Joe Van Tuyl recommended to the school board that they approve providing meals at their meeting on July 11, which they did. He said the option was available, so they decided to provide both breakfast and lunch to students.
The superintendent added that they spent several months gathering information from child nutrition at the State Department of Edcuation and doing calculations to see how the program would work.
“There’s many considerations that go into anything that we do in our school. They take on many levels of evaluations of what’s important, what’s not important,” he said.
“I think the one key thing is an evaluation that myself and the board believes the majority of our school patrons would favor that approach.”
He said that Stroud will receive increased funding through the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) program, however the school system will also have to fund a portion of the meal program as well.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service, CEP is a nonpricing meal service option for schools and school districts in low-income areas.
It allows qualifying institutions to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all students without collecting household applications.
Schools that use CEP are reimbursed using a formula based on a percentage of students categorically eligible for free meals based on their participation in other programs, such as SNAP and TANF.
While the program is reevaluated after one year and is a four-year application period, Van Tuyl said that he views providing meals to students at no cost to their families as a longterm, ongoing program.
“My assumption is that that program will continue for many years. One of the discussions I had with the board was that typically, there are programs that once you start them, they’re not programs that you walk away from in the future,” the superintendent said.
“Simply because there becomes an expectation that they’re going to exist as the normal operations of your school.”