Foreclosed Middle-Class Families Secretly Enrolling their School
Photo by Healingdream
It is a tragic situation- middle class families that have Foreclosed on their properties are enrolling their school-age children for free or subsidized meals. Many families are pleading with school officials to keep it secret. Peggy Lawrence of School Nutrition (director) said, “We’re seeing people who were never eligible before, never had a need”.
One of the victims is Sheila Dawson, who is currently working as a salesperson at one of the Wal-Mart chains. Her husband became unemployed and their income went down by $45,000. She has a daughter who is fifteen. The family has been doing their best to save money– buying clothes at thrift stores, cutting down on movies and now enrolling the child for subsidized lunches at school.
There has also been a sharp rise in the numbers of school children enrolling for this benefit. The main reason has been the downturn in the economy. But there are other factors at play – one being direct certification.
The Congress in 2004 mandated that the 17,000 school districts of the country to match the lists of student enrollment with the records of local food-stamp agencies. Thus, those who get food stamps are directly enrolled for the meal projects. The number of districts doing this has gone up and as well as the number of school-age children from families that qualify for food stamps. It went up from 12 million in 2009-2010 to 14 million in 2010-2011.
Kevin Conway of Mathematica Policy Research (project director) said, “The concern of those of us involved in the direct certification effort is how to help all these districts deal with the exploding caseload of kids eligible for the meals”. Conway co-authored an October study has recently been submitted into Congress for review; the bill deals with direct certification.
In 1946, Congress enacted the National School Lunch Act following World War II. The idea was to reduce surpluses of farm products while giving food support to children going to school. By 1970, this project was giving lunches to 22 million students on any average day – a fifth of these meals were subsidized. Since then, the subsidized section has increased while fully paid lunch numbers have decreased.
Never so many school-age children have become qualified for free lunch meals like they did during the 2010 fiscal year. Currently, the program is costing the country $10.8 million and has offered a total of 32 million lunches.
