School closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted children’s access to school meals in 2020 and 2021. School food service authorities (SFAs), which are responsible for planning, sourcing, preparing, and serving school meals, had to rapidly convert their usual on-site meal service operations to more flexible and mobile strategies to distribute meals to students directly in the community. Understanding the strategies SFAs used to implement community distribution programs for school meals and identifying what kinds of support are needed for success can inform better planning for future crises that may cause disruptions to school meals. This brief summarizes the results from a study that investigated how food service directors from 12 of the largest SFAs in the United States tackled the challenge of providing school meals when school was out and how this “stress test” on the school meal system revealed ways to potentially strengthen the financial model for SFAs in the future.
Published: January 2022
Publisher: Healthy Eating Research
Authors: Kenney EL, Fleischhacker S, Dai J, Mozaffarian RS, Wilson K, West J, Shen Y, Dunn CG, Bleich SN
State: National
Focus Areas: Nutrition Policy & Programs, School & After School
Resource Type: Research Brief
Keywords: School meal programs, Urban
Related Research
March 2023
“It has a lot to do with the cumbersome paperwork”: Barriers and facilitators of center-based early care and education (ECE) program participation in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP)
The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) is a federally-regulated feeding program that reimburses early care and education (ECE) programs for providing nutritious meals to low-income children. Participation in CACFP is voluntary and varies widely across states. This study assessed barriers and facilitators of center-based ECE program participation in CACFP and identified potential strategies MoreMarch 2023
Policy Opportunities and Legal Considerations to Reform SNAP-Authorized Food Retail Environments
Research was conducted using Lexis+ to evaluate statutes, regulations, and case law to determine the legal feasibility of requiring retail-based SNAP signage and nutrition disclosures, healthy endcaps and checkout aisles, and tying advertising restrictions to the licensing of SNAP retailers. Requiring retailers that designate certain foods or locations as SNAP-eligible to consistently do so in MoreMarch 2023