Abstract

Changes in school meal programs can affect well-being of millions of American children. Since 2014, high-poverty schools and districts nationwide had an option to provide universal free meals (UFM) through the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). The COVID-19 pandemic expanded UFM to all schools in 2020–2022. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study: Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011, we measured CEP effects on school meal participation, attendance, academic achievement, children’s body weight, and household food security. To provide plausibly causal estimates, we leveraged the exogenous variation in the timing of CEP implementation across states and estimated a difference-in-difference model with child random effects, school and year fixed effects. On average, CEP participation increased the probability of children’s eating free school lunch by 9.3% and daily school attendance by 0.24 percentage points (p < 0.01). We find no evidence that, overall, CEP affected body weight, test scores and household food security among elementary schoolchildren. However, CEP benefited children in low-income families by decreasing the probability of being overweight by 3.1% (p < 0.05) and improving reading scores of Hispanic children by 0.055 standard deviations. UFM expansion can particularly benefit at-risk children and help improve equity in educational and health outcomes.

Highlights

  • On a typical school day, almost 30 million students eat lunch served through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and 14.8 million students have breakfast via the School Breakfast Program [1]

  • CEP: Community Eligibility Provision; 95% CI: 95% confidence intervals; BMI: body mass index

  • This study finds that the adoption of CEP and universal free meals (UFM) in the early years of the program’s life has increased school meal participation and students’ receipt of free school meals, improved school attendance, and had additional academic and health benefits for several sub-groups of at-risk children

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Summary

Introduction

On a typical school day, almost 30 million students eat lunch served through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and 14.8 million students have breakfast via the School Breakfast Program [1]. Most of these meals—85% for breakfast, 74% for lunch [1]—. As school meals are almost universal (99% of US public schools and 83% of private schools participate in NSLP [6]), any changes in school nutrition have potential to affect the diets of millions of American children. Increasing evidence suggests that the quality of diet can impact academic achievement, school attendance, long-life income, and health [7,8], so changes in school nutrition have implications far beyond dietary outcomes

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