Moochelle our new "amerikan mom"----Why kids who aren’t poor are now getting free school lunches

Why kids who aren’t poor are now getting free school lunches - The Washington Post:
It used to be that students from families with low incomes qualified for lunches that were either free or available at a reduced price. That’s still true — but now, new federal rules allow kids who aren’t poor at many schools to get the same thing.

The change in the rules means not only that more kids will get to eat free- and reduced-price lunch but that what had been broadly used for years as a proxy for poverty rates among schoolchildren will no longer be useful for that purpose. Policymakers and researchers will have to find another measure of poverty... 
Under the federal Free and Reduced-Price Lunch Program, which was established in 1946 during the presidency of Harry Truman, students whose families earned no more than 85 percent above the federal poverty line and below that amount could qualify. The percentage of students who qualified has been going up over the years, with some 38 percent in 2001-02 to at least 50 percent by 2011-12.  That is different from the official poverty rate of children under 18, which rose to 23 percent in 2013.

New rules that went into effect this year allow for something called the “Community Eligiblity Provision,” which allows schools and districts to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students if at least 40 percent of them of them would have qualified by the old rules....

Why is the federal government doing this? As noted above, it will reduce paperwork for families and schools, but it will also help reduce the stigma that some children feel about eating in a government-funded program at school. You can read more about the program here. The ultimate cost of the program is unclear because nobody yet knows how many students will participate.