Start Date: November 2011

ID #: 69485

Principal Investigator: Rajiv Bhatia, MD, MPH

Organization: San Francisco Department of Public Health

Funding Round: Rapid-Response Round 4

See more related research

Share


During the 2009-10 school year, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) experimented with the removal of a la carte foods in one middle school and two high schools as a way to reduce stigma and increase National School Lunch Program (NSLP) participation. Learning from this pilot, SFUSD decided to eliminate all a la carte meals from schools during the 2010-11 school year. This project proposes a quantitative evaluation of the outcomes from this intervention. The intervention and its evaluation have broad policy relevance to national school food and child nutrition policies, including those related to funding the NSLP, and USDA regulations including financial record keeping of competitive foods. The specific aims of this study are to: 1) assess quantitative changes in student NSLP participation by income level (free/reduced/paid) before and after the removal of competitive foods, utilizing NSLP program participation data, and 2) assess quantitative changes in NSLP operating costs and revenues before and after the intervention, evaluating whether the elimination of competitive foods resulted in a positive effect on school finances. The study will take place in a large, multi-ethnic, urban school district of over 53,000 students, 61% of whom are qualified for free and reduced-price meals.

Related Research

July 2026

Forecasting WIC Funding Needs: Supporting Families, Strengthening Access

In partnership with Westat and with support from Healthy Eating Research, the National WIC Association (NWA) developed a new forecasting model to project funding needs of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) for Fiscal Year 2027. Report This report describes the model development, including methodology, as well as analysis conducted More

May 2026

SNAP participation and the healthfulness of food purchased by households with children during the pandemic

Changes in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic included emergency benefit allotments and operation waivers. Using five expenditure-based measures of the nutritional quality of food purchases, we tested whether changes in SNAP during the first year of the pandemic were associated with better nutritional quality of food purchases More

May 2026

SNAP Decisions: Qualitative Research on the Perceived Influence of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Benefit Changes on Food Purchases

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants experienced changes in benefits alongside the evolving social and economic environment. Understanding how these factors may have influenced food purchasing decisions can clarify SNAP’s role in shaping diet quality. This study aimed to document SNAP participants’ perspectives on how benefit changes during the pandemic influenced More