Using American Community Survey Data to Expand Access to the School Meals Programs (2012) / Chapter Skim
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To reduce this burden on families and schools and to encourage more children to partake of nutritious meals, USDA regulations allow school districts to operate their meals programs under special provisions that eliminate the application process and other administrative procedures in exchange for providing free meals to all students enrolled in one or more schools in a district. Because districts must use nonfederal funds to make up any difference between their costs and the reimbursement from USDA, the special provisions are most attractive for schools with high percentages of students eligible for free or reducedprice meals.
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Collecting information on households and their members -- including household composition, school attendance and educational attainment, income, participation in government assistance programs, and other characteristics -- the ACS provides data for constructing estimates of total enrollment and students eligible for free and reduced-price meals for schools and school districts. The panel examined alternative procedures for constructing such estimates, provided the Census Bureau with a set of specifications, and evaluated the resulting estimates.
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participation by ACS respondents, use of annual income in the ACS to determine eligibility rather than monthly income as in the application process, limitations of using ACS data to count migrant and other s tudents who do not live in traditional housing or do not live in the district all year, the presence of charter schools and other school choice opportunities that draw students from their neighborhood schools and the districts in which they reside, and errors in the certification process. The variation in differences between ACS and administrative estimates illustrated by Norfolk and Pajaro Valley demonstrates that a one-size-fits-all approach to correcting for the effects of these and other factors will not work.
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The district could operate an "AEO base year" to provide sufficient data to establish the benchmarking correction and incorporate the effects of the anticipated increase in participation due to offering free meals to all students. For any district that adopted the AEO, the annual release of ACS estimates would allow the district's AEO reimbursement claiming percentages to be updated each year to reflect the changes in socioeconomic and demographic conditions that are captured by the ACS.
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Department of Education, and the broader education research community in monitoring the prevalence of school choice opportunities and evaluating the effects of such opportunities on the accuracy of ACS eligibility estimates; monitoring by FNS of the accuracy of ACS eligibility estimates, the accuracy of administrative certification estimates, and the accuracy and stability of differences between the ACS and administrative estimates; sponsorship of research to develop a statistical model that could be applied to all districts in adjusting for differences between ACS eligibility estimates and school meals program certification data; and collaboration between FNS and the Census Bureau to improve the methods for deriving ACS eligibility estimates, with a focus on methods for small-area model-based estimation. Although these recommendations and those pertaining to technical assistance and related activities are appropriate for FNS to pursue if it chooses to implement the AEO, the panel developed other recommen
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One set of recommendations entails research activities that could improve ACS estimates for all uses, particularly those that require estimating whether low-income individuals are eligible for benefits under various assistance programs, such as the school meals programs. In addition to research to assess the quality of the panel's definition of "economic unit" for use in determining eligibility for free and reduced-price meals with the ACS, the panel recommends that the policy research community and the Census Bureau continue to investigate the causes of and solutions for not only the underreporting of income and program benefits, but also the differences in program eligibility estimates based on monthly and annual income.
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