Focus Area: School & After School

Alternative School Breakfast Service Models and Associations with Breakfast Participation, Diet Quality, Body Mass Index, Attendance, Behavior, and Academic Performance: A Systematic Review

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The United States (US) School Breakfast Program provides Breakfast After The Bell (BATB) to alleviate hunger, provide nutrition, and ensure students have a healthy start to the day. This study aims to review the evidence regarding the impact of BATB on students’ diet and academic outcomes, including participation, diet quality and consumption, body mass index More

Understanding Barriers and Facilitators of Universal Free School Meals in NYS

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When waivers for Universal Free School Meals (UFSM) ended in 2022, approximately 726,000 students lost access to free meals in New York (NY). This study examines the impact of maintaining (or de-implementing) Universal Free School Meals in NY, especially for Black and Hispanic/Latino families who may be disproportionately impacted by pre-existing inequities. This study will More

Reducing Student Exposure to Digital Food and Beverage Marketing: Policy and Practice Recommendations

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Digital marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children and adolescents is pervasive, highly effective, undermines healthy eating, and contributes to health inequities. Expanded use of electronic devices and remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the urgency for policy interventions to limit digital food marketing in schools and on school-issued devices. The US More

Rapid Health Impact Assessment on Changes to School Nutrition Standards to Align with 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans

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The national school breakfast and lunch programs administered by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) are cornerstone federal nutrition assistance programs. School meals are one of the healthiest sources of foods for school-age children, which is significant as some children receive up to half of their daily calories at school. Policy opportunities in 2023 More

Promising Strategies to Increase Student Participation in School Meals

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School meal programs play a critical role in feeding children. Meals served in school are generally of better nutritional quality than those that students bring from home and have been linked to improved academic performance and household food security. The aim of this research brief is to highlight and summarize rigorous evidence from a new More

Learning what works: case studies to understand parent perceptions of school meal programs during pandemic recovery

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The goal of this convergent mixed-methods, multiple case-study project is to identify existing equity-focused strategies that can be used to address negative parental perceptions that may be scalable in resource-deprived areas, and to inform hypothesis-driven research on which strategies are most effective. The two objectives of the study are to: 1) Describe multi-level contextual factors More

Costs, Reach, and Benefits of COVID-19 Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer and Grab-and-Go School Meals for Ensuring Youths’ Access to Food During School Closures

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School meals are associated with improved nutrition and health for millions of US children, but school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted children’s access to school meals. Two policy approaches, the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT) program, which provided the cash value of missed meals directly to families on debit-like cards to use for More

Pandemic-EBT and Grab-and-Go School Meals: Costs, reach, and benefits of two approaches to feeding children during school closures — Lessons from COVID-19 responses

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COVID-related school closures across the United States in spring 2020 disrupted the school meal programs that provide critical access to healthy food for millions of children — including children in elementary and middle school and adolescents in high school — from households with low incomes, leading to increased food insecurity. The United States Department of More

Reducing Student Exposure to Digital Food and Beverage Marketing

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Digital marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children and adolescents is pervasive and undermines healthy eating. During the COVID-19 pandemic, students’ time spent online for both recreation and school using educational technology doubled from 3.8 to 7.7 hours per day for 12- to13-year-olds, and racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities widened with children of color More