Free lunch eligibility trending downward in Macon
There are currently nine schools in Macon County that offer free lunches in low-income areas. File photo
For the second year in a row, Macon County Schools will request funding from county commissioners to bridge the gap in funding for free school meals for all K-12 students. But with data trending downward, it’s unclear whether the school system will be able to continue its free meal program for more than two more years.
“The generosity of the commissioners is wonderful, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to count on that every year,” said School Board Chairman Jim Breedlove.
There are currently nine schools in Macon County that operate under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), a non-pricing meal service option for schools in low-income areas. Franklin High School and Highlands School are the only two schools in the school district that do not qualify for CEP.
The CEP program allows schools to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students without collecting household applications for free and reduced lunch. Instead, schools that adopt CEP are reimbursed using a formula based on the percentage of students categorically eligible for free meals based on their participation in other programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Family (TANF) or Medicaid benefits, as well as children who are certified for free meals without an application because they are homeless, migrant, enrolled in Head Start or in foster care.
Any district, group of schools in a district or individual school with 25% or more students participating in these programs qualify for CEP.
Once a certain school qualifies for the CEP program, thereby allowing all students at the school to access free breakfast and lunch, that school remains in the program and can continue offering no cost meals for a five-year period, after which the school is reassessed.
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Schools in Macon County currently operate under CEP based on data from the 2022-23 school year.
“Our identified student percentage for that year was 53.45%, which means that we’ve been feeding kids for free at those nine schools and 85.5% of those meals are reimbursed for free,” said School Nutrition Director David Lightner.
The nutrition department has been trying to add Highlands School and Franklin High School to the CEP program, which means rerunning the data.
“When we look at the 2024-25 school year, our identified student percentage has dropped to 37.43%, which means only 55.89% of meals would be reimbursed at the free rate,” said Lightner.
Macon County Schools will therefore not be able to add FHS or Highlands School to the CEP schools for the coming year and will continue to operate based on the 2022-23 data.
“The data has been trending downwards since I started eight years ago, so I’m just going to put this out there that we’ve got two more years that we can use our current data,” said Lightner. “We’re looking at the likely possibility of losing several of our CEP schools at the end of two years.”
In the meantime, the school system has asked commissioners to fund Franklin High and Highlands School for the upcoming year to cover the cost of free meals, as it did last year. This year, it will require $250,000 to cover the gap in students at the two schools.
Macon County Schools does not currently qualify for district-wide CEP according to the 2025 Annual Notification of Schools Eligibility Report.
The county already has high participation in school nutrition.
“Lunch participation is 88%, which is kind of unheard of, and breakfast is at 60% which is pretty high for breakfast,” said Lightner. “So, to look at increasing that any further is kind of an unrealistic expectation with participation already being that high.”
The funding request from the commission is slightly higher this year than it was last year because of a drop in free and reduced lunch applications, which allow individual families or students to qualify for free or reduced lunch and breakfast regardless of a school’s CEP status.
With fewer families filling out those forms at FHS and Highlands, fewer meals will now be reimbursed at the higher free rate from USDA, and more need to be covered by the commission.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reimburses school nutrition programs for each meal provided to students — both paid and free meals. For the 2024-25 school year, the reimbursement rate for free students was $4.54, and $0.53 for full paid students. The USDA’s intent is for school nutrition programs to serve meals to paying students at a rate as close to the free reimbursement rate as possible.
At its April 28 meeting, the school board discussed ways to encourage families to fill out the free and reduced lunch forms, possibly by making them mandatory. However, administration said that most years, those applications aren’t ready in time from the state to be able to send out at the beginning of the year, and that after parents have gone through the process of filling out the packet of forms that are required of them at the beginning of the years, they are less likely to complete individuals forms that come home throughout the year.
“But again, that is only a short term solution, trying to get more applications,” said Lightner. “Either way, our CEP data has gone down every single year. We’re faced with the fact that several schools are going to have to go back to the traditional free and reduced applications unless the state and federal government comes up with a solution.”
