Commentary By Shanaysha Sauls: What he said!

In 2014, when Baltimore agreed to go with a universal free lunch program under the Community Eligibility Provision, we forfeited the annual and laborious collection of income information to account for students who were eligible for free and reduced meals. Because of high concentrations of poverty, Baltimore City—albeit with considerable and deep reservations—joined a growing national movement to provide free lunch district wide. In return for Baltimore’s prescient concerns about long-term affordability and counting of low income students, the State of Maryland held Baltimore harmless for three years to give the district an opportunity to figure out an acceptable and verifiable way to count its students living in poverty. It is now 2019, time has run out and the solutions we have, while certifiable, simply don’t add up. 

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Source: Baltimore Community Foundation.