There Are Omitted Reasons Why 51% of Kids Get Free School Lunches

And to think certain legislators want to cut and end the school lunch program.

Before anyone jumps up and starts pointing fingers, lest us not omit the increase in students determined physically, cognitively and psychologically disabled.  On average it is 17%.

It is extremely challenging caring for a disabled child and maintaining a full-time job, if any job.

Then there are foster children.  Children under the auspices of the state live in poverty.  This rate comes in at 5%.

Of course there is the lack of child care impact on ability to work.  17%.

Just with these data alone 39% of qualify children for free or reduced price lunches but I will note that these data may be crossed, missing and even contaminated.

I did not even broach the issues of justice, for which only those who are not at or slightly above the federal poverty level could ever possibly access.

The point I am attempting to make is that there is a myriad of factors to explain the increased rates of child poverty without having to reduce it to an ad hominem rhetoric of moral turpitude, political stances, entitlement or race.

Majority of public school students are now poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch

The share of public school students who qualify for free or reduced lunch in the United States has grown to 51 percent, in an indication of growing poverty, according to a report released on Friday.

The problem is most acute in Mississippi where 71 percent of students were in that category, according to the report from the Southern Education Foundation.

The group identified the share of students from low-income families by analyzing 2013 federal data on children who qualify for free or reduced lunch at school, which is offered to those from families at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of four, the poverty level is less than $24,000 a year and 185 percent of that figure is about $44,000.

A 2013 report from the Southern Education Foundation based on statistics from two years before found 48 percent of U.S. public school students were low-income.

In 2000, about 40 percent of the nation’s public school population was low-income, according to a previous report from the organization.

The organization has for years found the greatest poverty among students in the South and the West. In California, the nation’s most populous state, 55 percent of students qualified for free or reduced lunch in 2013.

By comparison, New Hampshire in the Northeast had the lowest rate at 27 percent.

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