Thousands More High-Poverty Schools Adopt Free Meal Program
A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that more than 18,000 high-poverty schools adopted community eligibility in the 2015-16 school year, allowing them to offer breakfast and lunch at no charge to students without processing individual school meal applications. This represents an increase of about 4,000 schools compared to the previous year, bringing the number of children served by participating schools to 8.5 million, according to the report.