As baking and pastry instructors at Musselman High School in West Virginia, Rachel Nauman and Allison McClintock understand how nutrition affects learning.
“I remember being young and hungry, and I couldn’t imagine going out the whole day without eating,” Nauman says. At her school, that’s not an issue. Thanks to the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) program, schools and districts in low-income areas can serve students breakfast and lunch at no cost without requiring household applications. But things are changing nationwide.
Federal cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) under the 2025 congressional budget resolution (H.R. 1) have been shrinking the pool of families automatically certified for free school meals over the past year. Starting Oct. 1, states will be responsible for 75% of SNAP administrative costs, up from the current 50%.
These changes to families’ SNAP status and state budgets can threaten districts’ CEP eligibility. In non-CEP schools, families that previously qualified for free lunch will have to reapply. That worries Nauman.
“Sometimes parents aren’t there, or are too proud to fill out the paperwork,” she says. The shift in free lunch policies has forced schools to navigate the administrative logistics.
The Impact of Program Changes
The cuts in H.R. 1 mean fewer families are “directly certified” for free meals — the automatic process where schools don’t need paperwork since the state knows the family receives SNAP. This is already having an impact.
“We are just beginning to hear concerns from members about drops in direct certification,” says Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association.
In place of direct certification, families are filling out applications, and that is going to complicate things. At Leonardtown Middle School in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, Principal Deborah Dennie says the paperwork is onerous.
“There’s a parent letter, that’s the front, and the back gives the federal income eligibility guidelines,” she says. Then there are four pages of instructions, and only then do parents get to the application, with its multiple sections and numbered subsections.
“The families who qualify for these things, they don’t want to spend the time to go through all of this paperwork,” Dennie says. That could mean kids who need a free lunch aren’t going to get one.
CEP eligibility is based on Identified Student Percentage (ISP) — the share of kids directly certified through SNAP and other programs. Cuts to SNAP risk shrinking ISP, which could mean schools’ reimbursement rate drops so low that CEP becomes financially unfeasible.
That concerns Sommer Purvis, the child nutrition director at Livingston Parish Public Schools in Louisiana, where kids get free lunch through CEP. From 2021-2024, direct certification percentages in the district increased. For the past two years, the percentage has dropped, putting CEP at risk.
“We have started to be very proactive with monitoring those numbers to see where we are, how they’re changing,” Purvis says. “We want to make sure that we’re prepared.”
How Schools Are Responding
With all these changes to free lunch, school leaders are getting proactive, and teachers are getting prepared. In West Virginia, nearly 183,000 students may be at risk of losing CEP. If it looks like that might really happen, McClintock thinks teachers will step up.
“Teachers are always going to support a free and reduced lunch,” she says. “They’re going to talk to their legislators. They’re going to talk to board members to make sure that is heard loud and clear. There’s going to be a lot of grassroots movement.”
Purvis is already preparing for the worst. If CEP collapses, she wants to be ready to help parents through the paperwork of individual applications.
“We are monitoring our lists and trying to make sure that we are capturing as many of those students as we can,” she says. Loss of CEP would be “a fundamental change for families.”
Purvis has already laid the groundwork, knowing the current situation might arise. “We’re very transparent each year,” she says. That means telling parents: “The paperwork is not required, but that is a year-to-year decision and things can change.”
Meanwhile, after 10 years with CEP, the district needs to start asking questions internally, says Purvis.
“How would schools handle those applications? Because after 10 years, a majority of our cafeteria managers have never processed applications,” she notes. “A majority of our principals have not had to deal with meal collection and meal debt.”
With that in mind, Purvis is already being “very honest and transparent with those individuals about what might be coming,” she says. She’s also looking at what training would be needed. She’s making lists of which principals and cafeteria managers may need a refresher or an introduction to the free lunch process, and hoping the state’s department of education will help foot the bill if training is needed.
At Leonardtown Middle, meanwhile, Dennie is thinking about the role that teachers will play. If paperwork becomes a hurdle for families, classroom educators will likely be the canary in the coal mine. “My teachers tend to have their ears to the ground and if they hear something, then they bring it to our attention,” she says.
A student’s father came in to see a teacher recently, and Dennie suspected he was dealing with financial distress. Dennie gave the teacher a heads-up, “and lo and behold, when she spoke to him, that was indeed the problem,” she says. “We ended up doing something as a school for the family.”
Teachers will need to be even more attuned to such situations going forward. Families may not apply for free lunch “either because of pride, or because of the packet itself and how cumbersome it can be,” Dennie says.
A Proactive Approach
At Bartlett Academy, an alternative high school in Oklahoma that serves many students experiencing poverty and homelessness, Principal Amy Sanders is betting that a proactive approach will help her team weather the coming storm.
The district never went to automatic certification, and instead has always had families fill out applications for free lunch, whether or not the family thought it was needed. “That way we have an accurate count every year,” she says.
The application is part of the school’s orientation packet, along with standards for discipline, behavior, dress code and so on. This way, applying for free lunch becomes … ordinary.
“We have a lot of Native Americans [families], and there’s a pride about not letting everybody know your business,” Sanders observes. “We’ve tried to make it where this isn’t ‘everybody knows your business.’ This is just routine.”
Dennie is also trying to be proactive. She has lists of students who got free lunch or incurred food debt last year, and makes sure they all get applications to take home. When parents come for an open house, the application is right there on the table for them to pick up and fill out later. And she includes information about free lunch in her weekly newsletter, all year long.
“We let them know that it’s there,” she says. “We want to make sure that everybody gets what they need.”
Dennie notes that teachers and administrators alike have to tread a fine line here. In the past she’s encouraged kids to apply for free lunch, but as a result, one parent reported her to the board. “He said I have no right to talk to his kid,” she recalls. “So I make them aware, but at some point, I have to back off.”