MUSD fights fraud, feeds kids

There is some fraud in the free and reduced-price lunch program that 51 percent of children in the Maricopa Unified School District participate in, with students who don’t qualify receiving federally funded meal assistance. However, due to diligent local oversight, the percentage of benefits that go to the wrong people is much lower here than in many other school districts.

According to MUSD Director of Child Nutrition Suzette Moe, who oversees the district’s food service, approximately 16 percent of applications for free or reduced-price lunches flagged for official verification this year were rejected for misreporting income or not responding to requests for documentation.

That percentage compares very favorably to some other districts where up to 93 percent of audited applications were rejected in the 2007-08 school year, but still means that as many 440 of the 2,730 local students participating in the program may be ineligible for the benefits they are receiving.

Since children in the program receive an average of $462 in benefits during a school year, as much as $200,000 in meal assistance may be going to MUSD kids who don’t qualify.

“There is a bit of an honor system,” said Tom Beckett, MUSD human resources director. “We generally trust what people say, but Suzette also hand enters each one of the applications and flags them if there is something that doesn’t look right.”

The Department of Agriculture, which administers the meal assistance program, requires districts to verify 3 percent of what are called “errorprone” applications, ones that show income levels close to qualification cutoff amounts for free or reduced-price meals. Moe goes beyond the required 3 percent, using her knowledge of the local community to identify suspicious applications.

“I pull the ones that are just ridiculous,” she said. “If I see a family of four living in one of the newer subdivisions reporting an income of $100 or $200 a week, I contact them to find out what is going on. I would say I verify about 10 percent of the applications in total, between the 3 percent the government requires and the extra ones I flag.”

Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act
The Federal School Lunch Program — which also provides free and reduced-price breakfast and afterschool snacks for children in need — was originally founded as a national security measure. During WWII, 8 percent of Selective Service registrants were found to be unfit for army service because of malnutrition or underfeeding.

After the war, Congress sought to remedy this situation with legislation crafted by Georgia Senator Richard B. Russell and signed into law by President Truman in 1946.

Section 2 of the act reads: “It is hereby declared to be the policy of Congress, as a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and wellbeing of the Nation’s children . . . by providing an adequate supply of foods and other facilities for the establishment, maintenance, and expansion of nonprofit school-lunch programs.”

Today, the program provides nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to more than 31 million children each school day, in public and private schools. All lunches served by the MUSD food service department are subsidized to some extent by cash payments from the federal government, even those for which children pay the going rate.

According to figures provided by Moe, reimbursement rates are $2.72 for free meals served, $2.32 for reducedprice meals, and 26 cents for regular-price meals. The district also receives an allotment of surplus food such as cheese and pasta that Moe draws on throughout the year.

Children do not have to be living in poverty to receive free or reduced-price meals, so the high percentage of MUSD students in the program does not mean that the community is poverty-stricken.

Children from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty level are eligible for free meals. Those with incomes between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level are eligible for reduced-price meals, for which they cannot be charged more than 40 cents.
Currently, 130 percent of the poverty level is $28,665 for a family of four; 185 percent is $40,793.

Children who are homeless or whose families receive food stamps or participate in certain other programs with independent income verification are automatically eligible for meal assistance and not subject to MUSD review.

2 types of fraud
Besides individual cheaters, who misreport income or family size to get meal assistance, some school districts have been caught with their hand in the till.

Because many federal programs use lunch assistance numbers as an indictor of need, districts with a high percentage of participating students get more Title I funds and other types of federal and state assistance. The $30 billion Title I program dispenses money to improve academic opportunities for the disadvantaged, recruit and train teachers, reduce class size and upgrade facilities, and the more lunch-assisted students districts have, the more funds they tend to get.

“Districts have a vested interest in having a high number of students enrolled in the Federal School Lunch Program,” Moe said.

According to investigative reporter David N. Bass, writing for Education Next, “Some districts encourage parents to fill out applications even if they are not sure they qualify. One district in Chillicothe, Missouri, offered parents a $10 Walmart gift card for turning in an application.”

MUSD does not offer any incentive for filling out applications, but it does send an application home with every student, according to Rick Neilson, assistant principal for career and technical education at Maricopa High School.

Sometimes districts go beyond enthusiasm for the program to outright fraud. In September the California Department of Education determined that the Oxnard Union High School District had to pay back the state and federal governments $5.6 million that it over billed for school meals.

“We found systematic over billing on free and reduced-price meals at every school in our district,” Oxnard Union attorney Jack Parham said.

Moe said there was no chance of that kind of fraud happening here.

“We are audited by the state and the district auditors, so there is no way I could be claiming students that we don’t actually have.”

According to Moe, auditors from the Arizona Department of Education go over every application she submits to make sure the students meet the guidelines — on paper, at least. But they do not attempt to verify the facts on the applications, leaving open the likelihood that parents who give false information will not be detected.

The application parents fill out for children to get meal assistance has a clause above the signature line that states, “I understand that if I purposely give false information, my children may lose meal benefits and I may be prosecuted,” but Moe says she doesn’t know of anyone who has actually been prosecuted for giving false information.

In fact, it is unclear who would have jurisdiction in such a prosecution, since local, state and federal agencies are involved in administering the program.

Putting children first
According to paymentaccuracy.org, an official website of the United States government, the $9 billion National School Lunch Program has the highest percentage of “improper payments” of any federal program, with $1.5 billion going astray in fiscal 2009. That naturally raises the hackles of legitimate fiscal conservatives.

On the other side of the scale, despite fraud and errors in payment, the program clearly benefits society through lower healthcare costs and higher educational attainment.

“The Effects of the National School Lunch Program on Education and Health,” an in-depth report published in January 2010, found that increased access to meal assistance added nearly a year to the level of educational attainment for male students.

This could be due in part to students attending school in order to eat when food is not available at home and so doing better and staying in school longer, or to better learning and success rates for students who receive adequate nutrition. Either way, to the extent that education is good for individuals, and educated people are more productive members of society, there is a direct connection between the school lunch program and the betterment of the nation.

Also weighing in the program’s favor is the natural compassion most people feel for hungry children. At MUSD schools, kids who might otherwise go hungry receive a hot, nutritionally balanced lunch each day that includes unlimited fruit and salad that they serve themselves from a salad bar.

“Children who need breakfast show up half an hour early, get in line and give the cashier their name and receive a healthy breakfast,” said Moe.

The degree of support for children’s well-being was demonstrated when the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act on Aug. 5. The bill was delayed for months afterward by Republican obstruction in the House of Representatives, but eventually passed there as well on Dec. 2.

When President Obama signs it into law it will, in the language of the House Committee on Education and Labor, “dramatically improve children’s access to nutritious meals, enhance the quality of meals children eat both in and out of school and in childcare settings, implement new school food safety guidelines and, for the first time, establish nutrition standards for all foods sold in schools.”

The act will provide $4.5 billion in new funding to expand school meal programs, combat hunger and improve children’s health over the next 10 years.

“My office is at district headquarters now instead of in a school, but I still see the children in the schools all the time,” said Moe. “When you see some of them coming in who have obviously gotten ready for school by themselves that morning, you know they really need this program.”

Meals served by MUSD food service in November:
Breakfast
Free meals 16,590
Reduced-price meals 2,626
Paid meals 5,195

Lunch
Free meals 39,376
Reduced–price meals 7,692
Paid meals 22,576

Including snack bar meal equivalents and adult meals, the MUSD food service program overseen by Suzette Moe served 108,781 meals in November.