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Interactive Maps: Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) Take-Up for School Years 2014-2016

Community eligibility is a powerful tool to ensure that low-income children have access to breakfast and lunch at no charge through the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs. The option became available to high-poverty schools and school districts in all states for the 2014-2015 school year.

These interactive maps provide information on the extent to which eligible school districts and schools in each state implemented community eligibility. As the color key indicates, states are shaded based on their take-up of community eligibility. The first map shows the share of eligible school districts adopting the provision, the second map shows the share of eligible schools adopting it, and the third map shows the share of highest-poverty schools adopting it.

When you scroll over a state, detailed data appear. When you click on a state, the bar chart below the map displays that state’s implementation data for last year and this year, and how the state compares to national data. 

 

 

 

School Year 2014-2015 Community Eligibility Data

In the 2014-2015 data, schools were defined as eligible for community eligibility if they had an ISP of 40 percent or higher, or if they adopted community eligibility.  Schools districts were defined as eligible if they included one such school.  The national and state percentages of eligible districts and schools exclude Maine, Ohio, and Oklahoma because they did not publish lists of eligible schools for 2014-2015.  For 2014-2015, the national and state percentages of schools with ISPs of 60 percent or higher adopting community eligibility exclude the five states for which school ISP categories could not be determined – Illinois, Maine, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota.  For the full notes on the 2014-2015 data, please see Zoë Neuberger, Becca Segal, Catlin Nchako and Kathleen Masterson, “Take up of Community Eligibility This School Year,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, February 25, 2015, https://www.cbpp.org/research/take-up-of-community-eligibility-this-school-year.

School Year 2015-2016 Community Eligibility Data

For the 2015-2016 data, schools are defined as eligible for community eligibility if their ISP is 40 percent or higher, and school districts are defined as eligible if they included at least one such school.  Ohio is omitted from the national and state percentages of eligible districts, eligible schools adopting community eligibility, and schools with ISPs of 60 percent or higher because Ohio did not publish a list of eligible schools for 2015-2016.  Illinois is omitted from the national and state percentages of schools with ISPs of 60 percent or higher because Illinois did not provide ISP data for its non-adopting schools. 

There are some states, however, where substantial changes occurred between the number of schools on the 2014-2015 list of eligible schools and the 2015-2016 list, creating the appearance of a more substantial change in take up than what actually occurred.  In Washington and Arizona, the states’ data collection methodology changed.  Florida and New York expanded their use of Medicaid data for direct certification, which improved their ability to identify low-income students and increased the pool of schools that were eligible for community eligibility.  Oregon corrected a mistake in the methodology used to generate last year’s list of eligible schools.