No Free Lunch? Wrong!
Long-time ACTA members may remember our concerns of how the Arlington Public Schools, and other Northern Virginia school districts, were verifying eligibility for the free and reduced price lunch program, an entitlement program funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The story was even picked-up by the Washington Post.
Based upon a comparison of statistics on free and reduced price lunches from the Virginia Department of Education to data on kids living in families in poverty from the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income & Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program, it appears that APS and other Northern Virginia school districts have a more expansive definition of entitlement than do many other Virginia school districts. For example, Arlington’s ratio is 3.64:1 while the Botetourt school district’s is only 1.78:1. For six Northern Virginia districts, the ratio was 3.02:1 while the ratio for 16 other Virginia districts was 2.29:1.
Since payments from Virginia’s K-3 Primary Class Size Reduction Program are predicated on free lunch eligibility, it seemed like the Virginia Auditor of Public Accounts might be interested in determining whether all of Virginia’s school districts adhere to the same eligibility standards, especially since payments from the K-3 program will be over $67 million in FY2006. Consequently, in late September we provided him with our analysis and an explanation of our concerns.