Ohio streamlines school lunch aid

About 1.8 million meals were served to pupils in Ohio public schools in the 2006-07 school year.

COLUMBUS (AP) — The state is making it easier for children of low-income families to enroll in a program that offers free school lunches.

Parents won’t face the usual paperwork this fall because their children automatically will be enrolled in the lunch program, which should help ensure that no eligible pupils are missed.

The Ohio Department of Education obtained the lists of families receiving food stamps or state cash assistance from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and will supply them to school districts starting this month for the automatic enrollment.

“The hope is that this will catch some of those people who fall through the gaps,” said Scott Blake, spokesman for the state Department of Education. “The way it worked before was that there was a paper form that children had to bring home from school, and parents had to fill it out and send it back.”

About 620,000 children statewide — or about 35 percent of pupils — receive free or reduced-price lunches through the program in which the federal government reimburses the state. A family of four must make less than about $39,000 to qualify for either program.

With automatic enrollment, there won’t be as much of a chance of parents’ not getting the forms or not filling them out or the forms’ not getting back to the schools for some other reason, Blake said.

He said the automatic enrollment also may help parents who feel that there might be some stigma attached to asking for help.

It also benefits parents who may have language barriers and don’t apply because they might not understand the program, said Brigette Hires, assistant director of the state’s School Meal Programs office.

Karen Truett, a spokeswoman for the Newark school district in central Ohio, said the new method should help schools and pupils.

“Now, not everybody fills out the forms even though they might be eligible,”

Automatic enrollment won’t apply to children whose parents don’t receive food stamps or state cash assistance, but they still can qualify for reduced-price lunches, Blake said. The parents would have to fill out forms in those cases.

An estimated 175 million meals — or about 1.8 million a day — were served to pupils in Ohio public schools in the 2006-07 school year. Of those meals, about 74 million were free and about 15 million were reduced-price meals.

The most recent reimbursement figures for the 2006-07 school year aren’t yet official, but Blake said the state received an estimated $228 million in federal money for school lunches — including paid, free and reduced-price meals.

The automatic enrollment process is based on a recent federal mandate and will be new to most schools, although some of the larger districts already have experimented with it and have found eligible pupils, Hires said.