Six Alabama school districts, including Jefferson and Baldwin County, will offer free breakfast and lunch to all students for the first time since the pandemic.
Together, those school systems enroll more than 87,000 students. Scroll down to see the list of school districts offering universal free meals.
“We know it’s important for our kids to get good, nutritious meals every day, because a hungry student can’t learn,” Jefferson County Superintendent Walter Gonsoulin said in a recent announcement to parents. “A hungry student can’t grow.”
The federal Community Eligibility Provision program allows every student in a school or district to receive free school meals so long as a certain percentage of students qualify for free and reduced price meals or are enrolled in SNAP or Medicaid.
Experts say universal meal programs can reduce the stigma of receiving free meals, and have linked the program to better attendance rates, test scores, and health outcomes among marginalized student groups.
The program runs throughout the school year. State lawmakers also recently approved $10 million toward a summer meal benefits program, which will go into effect in 2025.
Individual schools can apply for the CEP meal program, but if a school district participates, all students in that system can get the benefits.
In 2023-24, 118 out of 150 Alabama school districts and charter schools participated in the district-wide program, up from just 51 districts that participated in 2022-23, according to recent state data.
That’s about 415,000 children who had access to district-wide, free meals last school year. In total, just under 480,000 children had access to free meals through their schools.
And so far, at least six school systems will participate in the district-wide program for the first time this upcoming school year – including some of the state’s largest districts.
In Jefferson County, 37 out of its 54 schools were previously enrolled in the program. Now, the whole district will offer free school meals.
Baldwin County also will offer district-wide CEP for the first time next school year, along with Geneva City, St. Clair County, Calhoun County and Coffee County.
In 2023, the USDA lowered the requirements for districts to offer the program. Before, at least 40% of students in the district had to qualify for free and reduced price meals. Now, that threshold is only 25%, meaning dozens more districts in Alabama qualified last year.
Meals were free to every student in every school from 2020 to 2022 because of the pandemic. But when schools began charging again in 2022-23, many families didn’t know they would have to pay for meals or didn’t file the required forms for free and reduced-price meals.
If your school doesn’t offer CEP, you can find out whether your child is eligible for free meals, and access a copy of the form, here. Some organizations also offer free meals during the summer.
Large, unpaid meal debts have prompted several schools to enroll in CEP in recent years. A preliminary survey by the Alabama School Nutrition Association found that some schools that didn’t participate in the program had as high as $40,000 in meal debt last school year.
“If a school district has to financially support a child nutrition program, they’re taking monies away from teaching in the classroom,” ASNA Executive Director Sonja Anthony said in a recent interview. “So that’s what we’re trying to avoid at all costs.”
Just five school districts – Homewood, Madison City, Mountain Brook, Trussville and Vestavia Hills – were not eligible to participate this year. Together, they serve about 33,000 students.
The Alabama State Department of Education won’t have a full count of next year’s participants until 2025. But some are already announcing plans to renew for the fall.
In Autauga County, officials said the district saw a 20% growth in participation from the 2022-2023 school year to the 2023-24 school year.
“I am thrilled that our district will offer free meals again this year,” Audra Segers, the district’s Child Nutrition Program Director, said in a statement on the school system’s website. “Food insecurity, due in part to economic inflation, is a real concern for many families… Offering free meals during the school year helps eliminate at least one worry for parents and students so they can focus on learning and making the most of this school year.”
Still, some 145,000 children could be missing out on free meals next year.
Twenty-five school districts and one charter school, Magic City Acceptance Academy, were eligible for the district-wide program last year but had yet to sign up at the end of the school year, or only had some schools participating. (One factor could be that, while CEP allows students to get free meals, not all meals are reimbursed by the federal program at the same rate.)
Four school districts – Huntsville, Tuscaloosa County, Decatur and Florence – offer the program in some schools, but not all.
In Pell City, 65% of students qualify for free and reduced lunch, but officials said the program would interfere with Title I funding and declined to participate. The district is working with state officials to find alternatives, and will continue to offer its current free and reduced price meal program, which requires families to submit applications to participate.
“Pell City Schools’ longstanding practice has been to distribute all Title I federal funds among its four elementary schools,” the school wrote in an announcement to parents. “As it currently stands, participation in this free meal program would require that these funds be distributed among all our schools, therefore lowering the amount each elementary school currently receives.”
Anthony, at ASNA, noted that concerns about other funding sources are a common reason for some schools to opt out. And the program’s reimbursement rates, she added, sometimes aren’t enough to offset the cost of providing the meals.
Advocates are working on ways to ease those burdens for districts that would otherwise be eligible, she said.
“We just want to have that ability to feed our children,” she said.
Search your school district below to see if they provide CEP for all students. If you can’t see the table, view it here.
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