Monday, September 10, 2018

School Nutrition and Student Discipline: Effects of Schoolwide Free Meals


Under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), schools serving sufficiently high-poverty populations may enroll their entire student bodies in free lunch and breakfast programs, extending free meals to some students who would not qualify individually and potentially decreasing the stigma associated with free meals. 

This study examines whether CEP affects disciplinary outcomes, focusing on the use of suspensions. The authors use school discipline measures from the Civil Rights Data Collection and rely on the timing of pilot implementation of CEP across states to assess how disciplinary infractions evolve within a school as it adopts CEP. 

The results:  modest reductions in suspension rates among elementary and middle but not high school students. The findings suggest that the impact of school-based child nutrition services extends beyond the academic gains identified in some of the existing literature.

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