Durham hopes to become NC’s largest public school district to provide free lunch to all

Mary Helen Moore
·3 min read
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Durham Public Schools will apply for the federal government’s universal meals program, hoping to provide free breakfast and lunch to all children starting in the fall.

More than 30,000 students attend traditional public school in Durham, which would make the district the largest in North Carolina to give free meals to everyone, regardless of family income.

Daniela Flores said when she attended Riverside High School years ago, her parents didn’t know about the free lunch application and couldn’t give her lunch money.

“Twenty years later, do you think that it’s possible there could be children facing the same situation I did? Sitting down by themselves looking at their friends’ lunches thinking, ‘I wish I had their lunch. I’m hungry,’” she told the school board Thursday night. “Let’s end this hunger today.”

Her mom, Susana Diaz, was a teacher’s assistant at the time.

“Back then I couldn’t afford to pay for her lunch,” said Diaz, who is now an interpreter advocating for better pay, a topic the school board also discussed Thursday.

Saving the county $1.6 million a year

Giving away free meals wouldn’t cost Durham County anything, local leaders learned last week — and could actually wind up saving the district nearly $1.6 million a year.

That’s because the district qualifies for full reimbursement through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP.

  • For an entire district to qualify, 25% of students must automatically qualify for free school meals. This could be because their families receive food stamps, are enrolled in Medicaid, or are homeless.

  • In Durham, that percentage is 46%.

The savings would come from DPS being more fully reimbursed for those free breakfasts it already provides, and from not having to mail letters home and process applications for free and reduced-price lunches.

“I don’t want to leave any dollars on the table,” school board Chair Bettina Umstead said.

Research shows students in North Carolina schools participating in CEP perform better academically, according to the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina.

Retired DPS teacher Beverly McNeill was one of more than 100 people Durham CAN organized to attend the meeting in support of CEP. She was working in a Pennsylvania elementary school when it began offering free meals during the collapse of the steel industry.

“Within three weeks, I couldn’t recognize my kids. They were so different. They stopped fighting. They were interested in learning,” McNeill said. “This is really important.

Title 1 funding concern

Some leaders remain concerned about the impact on Title 1 funding, which helps low-income schools with their academic goals.

Like most districts, Durham identifies Title 1 schools by the percentage of students qualifying for free and reduced-price meals. With CEP, they would have to measure poverty a new way.

“No cost does not mean no impact,” school board member Alexandra Valladares said about CEP.

That will likely cause spending to shift among the district’s poorer schools, but staff said it will not result in Title 1 money going to the district’s richest schools.

Interim Superintendent Catty Moore said they’ll continue “pulling the onion layers back” to understand all potential impacts.

“In terms of the eligibility, we could have moved forward a year ago,” Moore said. “In terms of understanding the impact and being able to figure out how to mitigate that impact, we were not there yet. We’ve done that work in the interim.”

Hundreds of individual schools across the state get free lunches through CEP — including half of Durham’s 56 schools — but the federal government only pays for free meals for all in five North Carolina school districts:

  • In the mountains: Buncombe, Haywood, Rutherford, Wilkes

  • On the coast: Beaufort

That number could rise, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture lowering the qualifying percentage from 40% to 25% after the coronavirus pandemic.

Durham’s school board will learn more about the status of its application in June.