John Skretta
5905 O Street
Lincoln, NE 68505
November 8, 2024
Lincoln Public Schools knows that school meals are critical to student learning and student health. A well nourished child is able to focus, concentrate, and learn. With 63 different school cafeterias or “franchises” you could almost contend that LPS is the largest restaurant in town! Every day, we serve almost 25,000 cartons of milk and nearly 28,000 lunches. That’s over 4.3M lunches in a school year.
One of the means by which we have been able to better ensure our students receive optimal nutrition and the food they need at school in order to thrive in the classroom setting and beyond is by conscientiously working to ensure schools eligible for Community Eligibility Provision or CEP receive this status. This is a non-pricing meal service option for schools and school districts in low-income areas and we obtained categorical eligibility with the USDA (state and federal authorities) through Direct Certification of population thresholds via Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TNAF), Medicaid eligibility, etc.
We now have 23 of our schools operating under CEP and you can see the list and learn more at https://home.lps.org/ns/community-eligibility-provision/
CEP is a huge success story in supporting students’ wellbeing and meeting their nutritional needs. At CEP schools, Nutrition Services is averaging 850 more lunches and 680 more breakfast served per day than last year. Participation rates are SIGNIFICANTLY higher at CEP schools than counterparts. 80% of the students at CEP schools are eating school lunch and48% of the students at CEP schools are eating school breakfast.
Lincoln Public Schools will continue to strive for optimal student meal offerings within the federal requirements in order to ensure student well-being, and because we know the correlation to classroom learning outcomes is a strong positive one for students whose nutritional needs are being met to the extent we can do so.
We thank Senator Hughes for bringing forward this important study.
