Back to School Meals Updates - More MA Schools Electing CEP; MassHealth and Free School; Erroneous Billing for Student Meals

FoodSNAP

We're writing to alert you to a couple of items that may impact children in your community:

1. More MA School Districts Elect the Community Eligibility Provision to provide universal free school breakfast and lunch!

This AM, the Department of Early and Secondary Education (DESE) shared some exiting data about the additional school districts that have elected the federal CEP option. DESE reports that 18 more Massachusetts schools districts, with almost 40K more students are participating in CEP. The new school districts include Chelsea, Brockton and Provincetown. And Chicopee is expanding their CEP to include more schools. This means that 25% of MA students qualify for free meals without having to file a low income application to qualify (and relieving the school of having to track applications, collect payments, etc). 

Below is a chart mapping the growth in the CEP option.

School Year

Number of Districts Participating 

Number of Students 

Percent of State Enrollment

2013-14

1

57,000

6%

2014-15

22

142,000

15%

2015-16

48

200,000

21%

2016-17

66

239,000

25%

There remain a number of school districts with high numbers of low income children that should also participate in CEP but currently do not (including Lynn MA). If you work in a low-income community which has not elected CEP, please contact Pat Baker at MLRI, pbaker@mlri.org. What is CEP?  Check out FRAC's CEP fact sheet here and their CEP website here:

2. Children who receive MassHealth are also eligible for free school meals - including SSI children, kinship care children, others.

A few years ago, MA applied for and got federal USDA approval to administer a pilot to "directly certify" children receiving MassHealth (Medicaid) for free school meals, provided the child or family's income was below 133% FPL.  These students are part of a data exchange between DESE and the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) that facilitates the direct cert process. DESE uploads to the Virtual Gateway regular lists of all children "direct certified" for free school meals based on receipt of TAFDC, SNAP or Medicaid. School districts run their student data against these DESE direct certification lists. Due to a policy and/or programming error, DESE and EOHHS neglected to include children eligible for Medicaid when they receive a federal benefit such as SSI and federal Title IVE Adoption Assistance, or receive Medicaid through DCF Foster Care or the Department of Youth Services. Because EOHHS does not track some of the Medicaid children by gross income level (because Medicaid is automatic), they were inadvertently left out of the data match used for the Medicaid Direct Cert pilot.  DESE is adding these children to the Virtual Gateway Direct Cert data files tomorrow, Wednesday September 7th, and will be notifiying all school districts of this data upload.

If you work with grandparents raising grandchildren, kinship care families, children on SSI (but not TANF or SNAP), DCF children - and they are NOT automatically getting free school meals, please let me know ASAP.  Attached is a flier to share with your kinship care families whose grandchildren/nieces and nephews have been harmed by this oversight.

3. Are schools billing families for school meals provided to students who should have been directly certified for free meals?

If you become aware of any families who have received a bill for unpaid school meals - and the family was receiving SNAP, TAFDC or Medicaid and the child was not approved for free meals - please let MLRI know ASAP.

We recently became aware of a Woburn family hit with a $212 bill for meals provided to a student last school year, even though the child was a recipient of TAFDC (and still is). It is unclear why this student was not "directly certified" for free school meals, as his receipt of TAFDC (and MassHealth) was enough to qualify him.  The School District informed the family the child would be barred from extra curricular activities (sports, plays, etc) until the Mom payed the bill. After a lot of go around, DTA Central thankfully weighed in on Friday with the School Super and he agreed to drop the meal bill.

We would like to know if you are seeing any more cases like this, as we are hoping to get to the bottom of why SNAP and TAFDC children are not getting picked up in the Direct Certification process.