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Is the overhead in deciding who gets free lunch and who doesn't and then managing the debt really saving more money than just giving all public school kids free

• monkpit 1y ago
  Incentivized because it’s privatized
• dsr_ 1y ago
  If you throw in the effects on school attendance and participation, yes. Massachusetts extended the free school lunch (and breakfast) program to all students in 2023. Here's the report on 2024: https://www.mass.gov/doc/universal-free-school-mealsfinal070124/download https://www.mass.gov/doc/universal-free-school-mealsfinal070... It's nominally 20 pages but the first five are boilerplate and ToC and the last ten are a listing of how much each school district received, so you could reasonably read all the actual report.
• klodolph 1y ago
  You can look at stats from NYC: https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/if-no-student-pays-cost-to-provide-free-lunch-for-all-of-new-york-citys-elementary-school-students.html https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/if-no-student-pays-cost... The report used 2014-2015 numbers, where the cost of lunches for elementary students was $102 million and the participation rate was 57%. It estimates that universal free lunch would cost the city an additional $5.2 million. Part of the costs would be offset by federal reimbursements, so the full estimate is higher than $5.2… the details are in the report. So yes, it would cost more to make it free for everyone. I still think it should be free for everyone, but it is hard to argue that you can save money that way.
  • dahart 1y ago
    So maybe $5M on a NY state education budget of nearly $40B, or less than two hundredths of one percent. Isn’t it weird that we pay for everything else but keep the food in a separate accounting budget?
    • klodolph 1y ago
      You’re comparing the NY state education budget against a program for elementary school students in NYC using numbers from different decades. If you want better numbers, a good place to start would be to take total cost per student for a given year and the cost per lunch for the same year, and multiply cost per lunch by number of days and some participation rate %.
      • dahart 1y ago
        Which decades? Are you saying the $5M number is too small because this article was from 2017, and I used budget from 2024? Okay, the NY state budget in 2017 was a bit over $25B. That actually still leaves the answer at two hundredths of one percent, since I rounded up and left lots of room for error. ;) I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? Even if we did exactly what you suggest, and even if the numbers were more accurate, the outcome doesn’t change: it’s weird to account for lunch outside of the rest of the system, when lunch is such a tiny minuscule cost, it could be funded without blinking.
        • klodolph 1y ago
          2010s and 2020s are the two different decades. I found $23,884 expenditure per child in 2014-2015, which is when the $4.30 school lunch cost is from. With 180 instructional days, lunch would be $4.30/day x 180day/year / $23884/year = 3.2%. > I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? You were off by a factor of 150, about. Kinda big. I guess you could be stuck here doing research until next week. I searched “nyc cost per student school 2014” and plugged some numbers into a calculator. I made sure to put all my numbers up there with units in case you disagree with the numbers or disagree with the formula. If you want to use newer numbers you can do that, but I think it’s important to use numbers from the same time, more or less. These “off by 3x, 2x, 4x” errors add up to orders of magnitude if you make enough errors like that. I was disagreeing with your estimate because there were too many errors. Just kind of a gut feeling.
  • snarf21 1y ago
    In the current moment, I agree that "the state" can't save money by making it free for everyone. However, it is a lot harder to quantify how much other savings are realized by having healthier kids and reduced healthcare costs. Plus we know kids do better in school when fed well and that long term taxable income, better colleges, business job generation, etc. could eventually pay for itself. Obviously this is a much more complicated thing to calculate and quantify.
    • klodolph 1y ago
      I agree… and yet “it’s cheap, it’s the right thing to do, and provides massive benefits” is a different argument from “it pays for itself”.
      • ctkhn 1y ago
        the problem is that "it pays for itself" is true in the overall societal sense, where a few more kids don't end up in jail or psych wards or something, but there's no way for the school to capture that value when deciding "do we want to feed kids at school?" and so we usually don't do it :/
        • bee_rider 1y ago
          It is worth keeping in mind that the broader effects might still be positive. But, I think the original poster was just asking about the direct cost of determining who gets the free lunches (that’s why they frame it in terms of the overhead). While I agree that a full analyst of the social benefit would be better, and I bet it would almost certainly end up being a net positive (and also, the possibility that kids are just not getting fed because of record-keeping screw-ups, missed paperwork, or incomplete programs is just unconscionable), the question the asked about the overhead does have the benefit of being a lot more answerable and direct.
      • TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
        Not quite. The argument then becomes about pointing out that our accounting systems are stupid, brutish and terrible at modelling second order consequences - social, economic, even moral. In fact they seem designed to hide these consequences, both good and bad. The features we tag profits and losses are right out front, while other important features are labelled "externalities" and essentially ignored. This is very obvious in the differences between US and other Western attitudes to infrastructure spending. In the EU, public transport is heavily subsidised. It isn't expected to be profitable because it provides both direct and indirect returns. No one rational - who isn't a chef - expects their fridge or cooker to be a profit source. Big public infra projects are no different. They're a kind of giant public appliance. You buy them to provide a service. In the US and UK, the goal of infrastructure spending is usually to create private profits. This certainly creates returns for a small class of people, but it only seems rational because it's pretending other kinds of returns don't exist.
  • insane_dreamer 1y ago
    > it would cost more to make it free for everyone That's assuming everyone would sign up for the free lunch. We have 2 kids in public schools and pack their lunches even though we could sign them up for free lunch (our state makes it available to all families). We're not alone in that either. (We're also not rich, but we put a high priority on healthy food.)
• internetter 1y ago
  Without reading into lunch specifically, I'd very much be inclined to say yes. The reason is, I spent many hours researching the fair structure of my transit agency. Fares that have, obviously, been in the news for being harming to low income citizens. What I found was that the city spent almost 1 billion on upgrading their collection systems, whereas the yearly revenue from those same systems amounted to 1/10th of that. It is very likely that these new systems will actually reduce revenue, as the agency has admitted. Not to mention the operational overhead of waiting for people to tap as they get on. I strongly believe in social democracies, but our governments are awful at spending our money. https://boehs.org/node/free-the-t https://boehs.org/node/free-the-t
  • mjevans 1y ago
    I suspect the only real benefit is a change in behavior of some passengers. They _paid_ for a thing and therefore feel more respectful towards it. Which would be related to the other symptomatic reasons such a barrier might be sought. As a society my country (USA) sadly has low respect for the commons generally. There's a lack of investment (not none, but not enough), a sense of 'me-ism' entitlement in the population (as if sharing and consideration of others shouldn't mutually be the priority for a public space), and unwillingness to address national scale issues that lead to blights upon the commons (mostly thinking of people society has failed). None of those are easy enough to fix that a reasonably sized reply could even begin to adequately cover a solution, but those problems are some reasons why a gated access to a public resource might be sought other than as a form of funding.
    • internetter 1y ago
      While I do not deny that this might very well be a problem, it feels fallacious on the part of the American public. One, they are indirectly paying for it already by way of taxation. Two, I'd argue it is much better to be respectful towards things you didn't pay for.
      • mjevans 1y ago
        We agree. Including to not respect things someone (indirectly) paid for through taxation. Part of the me-ism issue I called out in the larger post.
• tantalor 1y ago
  Pittsburgh Public Schools started doing this (free breakfast & lunch) in 2014: https://www.pghschools.org/departments/food-services/free-meals https://www.pghschools.org/departments/food-services/free-me... This program replaces free & reduced-price lunch for qualifying kids, with "free for everybody". They directly cite reasons like increased participation and better service (faster lines). It also cuts down on administrative overhead (don't need to separately qualify each kid). Another benefit is kids are not shamed for getting free lunch, since everybody gets a free lunch. It is a USDA program: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep I'm genuinely worried the current administration will decide it is a waste of money, or woke, or some other BS.
  • dzdt 1y ago
    Indeed universal free lunch programs are on the chopping block. To my understanding the cuts are still at the proposal stage though. [1] https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/03/12/house-republican-budget-would-slash-free-school-meals-for-many-students/ https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/03/12/house-republican-budget...
    • tantalor 1y ago
      Thanks, I hate it
• Kapura 1y ago
  I feel like there's the administrative overhead, but also every child having food when they are learning is sure to be a profound positive externality. The only outcome of having kids to go to school hungry or receive substandard education is keeping the poorer classes of society "in their place." This is very gross.
  • piva00 1y ago
    The issue is that the positive externality is really hard to measure, and penny-pinching policies only care about what is easily measured, it's just another instance of the McNamara fallacy. As a non-American, reading about the welfare rules in the USA feels absurd, there are so many overlapping programs with distinct qualifications, rules, payouts, it simply cannot be efficient to keep track of all of that for recipients. It feels like the design is to make it as hard as possible to keep track of what one is eligible to, it's designed to be painful and unreliable. There is a cultural thing in the USA about punishing poor people, as if it's only through their own failure of character that they are poor, instead of trying to help lift the less fortunate ones the approach seems to be to punish them in the hopes that will force them out of their precarious position through some heroic individual action. It simply isn't reasonable or has any basis in reality, probably some weird cultural leftover from the religious nuts who founded the country.
    • Kapura 1y ago
      You shouldn't have to measure the fact that feeding children does good, and you should push back against anybody who thinks you should (because they clearly don't want all children to eat, a strong signal of fucked up morality).
      • horacemorace 1y ago
        This so much. My HCOL area uses a hybrid approach: kids can always eat regardless and can run up huge $$$ tabs. The parents get pestered once it gets over a few hundred.
      • piva00 1y ago
• insane_dreamer 1y ago
  I would say yes. In our state all public school kids are eligible for free lunch by just signing up. What's the worst that can happen? Some parents who could afford lunch get it for free? I'd rather my tax dollars go to that than going to a whole bureaucracy designed to ensure that only those who "deserve" it get it. As far as "rich people are getting free lunches!!!" argument. 1) rich people for the most part send their kids to private, not public schools. 2) rich people who can afford better lunches than the school lunch are going to send their kid to school with a lunch.
• AzzyHN 1y ago
  Cruelty is the point sometimes as well
  • reassess_blind 1y ago
    Who’s cruelty, and what’s the motivation?
• petesergeant 1y ago
  Yes, but that's Socialism, and son, this is an America.
• tmpz22 1y ago
  While we bicker this inane question a much vaster sum is being transferred to the ultra wealthy from the public coffers. Penny Rich Dollar Poor.
• scotty79 1y ago
  Food is way cheaper than any work. But the way it is today more people can sit in their bullshit jobs and use them as excuse to get money.