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SACRAMENTO — State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell today announced four state agencies are officially launching a program that allows low-income students to be directly certified for free meals at schools through a state-level automated matching system.

"No child should ever go to school hungry, and they should never have to wait to qualify for free meals because of slow bureaucracy," said O'Connell. "This direct certification program will have an enormously positive impact on our battle with both hunger and childhood obesity. Through direct certification, schools would provide free and healthy meals more quickly to thousands of eligible children without the burden of making their parents fill out paperwork that had to be processed manually."

Direct certification is a win-win for schools and students. Schools benefit because the program increases the number of children eligible for free meals, participation in the school lunch and breakfast programs, and the federal dollars that come to the school for meal reimbursement. Participation in direct certification also reduces the amount of paperwork associated with certifying children for free meals, the need to fill out school forms, and eliminates of the possibility of losing forms between school and home. Students benefit because they qualify to receive automatic eligibility for free and reduced-price meals before the new school year even begins.

Congress required states to ensure that a method of direct certification for free meals be phased in between 2006 and 2008 depending on the level of school district enrollment. Assembly Bill 1385, sponsored by Assemblymember John Laird (D-Santa Cruz) in 2005, required the California Department of Education (CDE),  California Department of Social Services, California Health Care Services, and California Student Information Services to work together to develop a direct certification approach through a state-level automated matching system.  

Direct certification works by matching student enrollment data with Food Stamp Program and CalWORKs recipient data. Because the system is fully automated, confidential student information is not shared between programs. School districts electing to use this system will receive a list of students who are automatically identified as eligible to receive free meals without additional paperwork.

CDE's Nutrition Services Division has been working closely with the other three agencies for more than a year to develop this system as a pilot project that was first tested in August 2007. Following the initial test, a second state-level data match was done in September 2007. Up to 30 school districts used the system successfully and reported that they were able to qualify more students for free meals through direct certification than if they had only tried to match their student eligibility list against their county welfare department's list. Now CDE's Nutrition Services Division and California Student Information Services are working toward promoting the direct certification program throughout the state, especially among districts with enrollments of less than 10,000 students, before the July 1, 2008 implementation deadline. Both offices are also training more school districts on how to use the new system.

The direct certification program lessens the burden on schools and parents of filling out unnecessary forms that aligns with O'Connell's Paperwork Reduction Initiative. He has also made increasing participation in the school meal programs a high priority so that no child goes hungry – a key component toward closing the achievement gap.

"Studies show hunger interferes with a child's ability to learn," O'Connell said. "By providing students quicker access to nutritious meals through direct certification, this may help us whittle away at the disturbing and persistent achievement gap that exists between students who are poor and those who are affluent, and also between students who are African American or Latino and their peers who are white or Asian."

O'Connell has made closing the achievement gap a top priority for his second term in office. He will convene an unprecedented meeting of the minds of state and national education stakeholders during an Achievement Gap Summit November 13-14 in Sacramento. For more information, please visit GAP Summit - Request to Attend [http://www.sjcoe.org/summit/index.aspx] (Outside Source).