Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. board trustees on Monday night will once again consider adding additional elementary schools to a meal service option that would provide federally-funded meals at no cost to students.
Board members during their last meeting on May 19 were asked to give permission to district officials to submit an application to the Indiana Department of Education to add W.D. Richards and Mt. Healthy elementary schools to the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) program, which allows schools located in high poverty areas to offer breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service.
BCSC’s four Title One schools — Clifty Creek, Schmitt, Smith and Taylorsville elementaries — are already in the program after being added last summer. The program, while federally-funded, is administered by the state, which allows districts to apply individually, as groups or as the entire district.
The school corporation was initially focusing on the four Title One schools because using the CEP district-wide would cause a “substantial financial setback” in lost reimbursement from the federal government, Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Operations Brett Boezeman said last year.
Rather than collecting and verifying individual school meal applications for free and reduced-priced meals, schools that adopt the provision are reimbursed by the federal government using a formula based on the percentage of students who automatically qualify for free meals through programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), according to the USDA, among other factors. This is referred to as a district’s direct certification rate, which automatically qualifies students for free and reduced meals using data from the Family and Social Service Administration.
Data from the Indiana Department of Education show that BCSC reported 5,008 of its 11,657 students, or nearly 43%, received free and reduced lunch benefits this past school year.
Board members last month opted to pause taking action on the measure and instead agreed to amend the ask to add all of the seven elementaries not part of the CEP currently to the request, contingent on a budget review to see what the financial impact of doing so would be.
A memo from Boezeman to board members in advance of Monday’s meeting says that administrators intend to recommend adding just Richards and Mt. Healthy at this time, but consider adding additional schools on an annual basis, depending on their feasibility.
Mt. Healthy and Richards were the next couple to be added because they had the next two highest direct certification rates that would result in a near break-even for the district’s food service account.
Trustees took part in a work session on June 9 to discuss an analysis put together by district officials showing the impact of adding additional schools to the CEP.
The analysis found that adding every elementary school to the CEP would cost the district anywhere between an estimated $781,053.88 and $955,893.30 in the next year, depending on how much meal participation increases. The more meals students in a given school eat as a result of the CEP, the higher number of meals the district gets reimbursed for by the federal government.
Meal participation at the four title schools jumped on average 30% for breakfast and 15% for lunch in the past year, exceeding what administrators had initially expected.
While officials said the increase in participation would not nearly be as high in the non-Title schools, the analysis included that assumption. Meaning if meal participation were to increase 30% for breakfast and 15% for lunch across all schools, BCSC’s food service account would run $781,053 in the red, and the district would be required to make that up with non-federal dollars in other accounts.
The analysis provided that adding Richards and Mt. Healthy would result in an impact on the food service account anywhere between negative $65,185.16 and $11,980.21 in the green. The school with the next highest direct certification rate was Parkside. Adding Richards, Mt. Healthy and Parkside would result in a financial impact anywhere between $155,393 and $262,972 in the red, according to the analysis.
The deadline to add schools to the CEP for next school year is June 30. School board members will meet on Monday at 6:30 p.m. in the Terrace Room at the BCSC Administration Building at 1200 Central Ave.
