No Cost Meals Coming to ACPC and ACIC
(By Matt Pedigo, The Citizen-Times, June 5, 2014)
Trial runs for new school-wide no-cost meal programs at the Allen County Primary Center and Intermediate Center went well overall, school officials say.
In its May 19 session, the Allen County Board of Education voted to have the two schools participate in the US Department of Agriculture’s Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), In CEP schools, paid and reduced-price student food programs are eliminated, and all students eat breakfast and lunch at no charge.
CEP eligibility is based on “direct certification” rates among a given school’s student body; this refers to the number of students whose families are already receiving some form of public assistance, which automatically qualifies the children for free or reduced-price meal programs.
ACPC’s and ACIC’s rates qualified, but James E. Bazzell Middle School and Allen County-Scottsville High School did not. For the upcoming 2014-2015 school year, students in these upper-level schools will still see the current system, while ACPC and ACIC will fully begin CEP.
Faculty and visiting adults will still have to pay, and parents or guardians will still have to pay for current outstanding debts in their children’s accounts. Anyone purchasing ala carte items would still have to pay for them. Children can still bring their lunches as well.
Last Thursday at ACPC and Monday at ACIC, plans for implementing CEP were tried for the first time as an experiment before full CEP implementation when the new school year begins August 6 (August 18 for pre-schoolers, who have a four-day, full-school-day week).
Both schools were already offering breakfast for a significant portion of the student body, and lunch for all, with some students paying and others on free or reduced programs. Breakfast would see the main changes.
At ACIC, implementing CEP—aside from students no longer needing money to eat—meant simply a change in breakfast-time student volume. The school was already feeding about 300 breakfasts daily. Under CEP, that will increase to the school’s entire fourth, fifth and sixth-grade student body of about 650. Students will still use meal cards—a CEP requirement to keep up with the number of meals served, Food Services Director Mary Hobdy noted.
Principal Randy Cook said ACIC’s trial went well overall, though, he said, more supervision will be needed in the fall to direct students to their tables after they get their plates—a must to save time and meet class schedules when feeding more students in the morning.
But at ACPC—with a current 1,105-member student body and a projected student body of 1,050 or more in grades pre-school through third in the new year—implementing CEP at breakfast time required a whole new plan. The school was already feeding about 700 students at breakfast, but adding another 400 or so would have altered the school’s morning class timetables.
“The number of students was our biggest obstacle,” ACPC Principal Tim Wilson noted. “We searched for other (Kentucky) schools this size that were doing (CEP), and they didn’t exist.”
Wilson, Hobdy, Superintendent Randall Jackson and cafeteria staff members met several weeks in advance of Thursday’s test to devise a new plan. ACPC was already having a morning meeting (before the “tardy” time of 7:50 a.m.) in which students begin their day by going into the gymnasium. It is a fun few minutes before the instructional day begins, offering music and activities like the announcing of students’ birthdays.
The new plan incorporated that as a platform from which CEP breakfast service could be launched daily. In the plan, as students leave the morning meeting, food stations will be set up at the gym’s exit points for first, second and third graders. At the stations, students will each grab a pre-bagged breakfast, featuring, as per USDA nutritional guidelines, two grains, a fruit and milk. The students eat in their classrooms.
Kindergarten and pre-school students will still eat breakfast in the cafeteria as they currently do.
Federal administrators granted the school’s requests to use the “grab-and-go” bagged-breakfast format, and for a variance from the meal cards, allowing ACPC to use tally sheets instead to keep track of meals.
Lunch will be much more like the current system, aside from students no longer needing money and administrators no longer having to keep up with lunch account balances and overages or the free/reduced-meal application process.
In time, Wilson noted, the program may also boost academic performance. He cites studies showing that children who get a wholesome breakfast in the morning tend to fare better as the day progresses.
Hobdy said CEP guarantees that all ACPC and ACIC students have access to at least two full meals daily—in a district that, sadly, still has numerous children going hungry when they’re not in school.
“It’s all about feeding kids,” Hobdy adds. “I like the fact that every child has the opportunity to have breakfast before they start their day, and can sit down with everyone else to eat—it will become a norm.”
The CEP enrollment is a year-by-year decision for up to four years. After that—for those who can pay—money may again be required for school meals. CEP has been in use in Kentucky schools for four years now, and currently serves 69 school districts—372 individual school in all.
As CEP progresses, Parents are reminded that, because Allen County is a “split district” under CEP, sixth-grade students transitioning out of ACIC will again need meal money—or a free/reduced application— as they enter JEBMS.
Also at the May 19 meeting, the board approved a 10-cent increase in lunch prices ($1.65 to $1.75) that, with CEP’s adoption, will only apply to JEBMS and AC-S. Breakfast prices remained unchanged, at $1.10. The dime-a-lunch increase, also taking effect this August, brings the basic full-pay price to feed a student breakfast and lunch for the entire school year to $484.50.