State won’t use free lunch program as poverty indicator, By Maureen Hayden, May 24, 2013, News and Tribune: “Indiana is changing the way it counts low-income students in public schools because Republican legislators suspect fraud in the federal school-lunch program used to measure poverty. Tucked inside the budget bill passed by the General Assembly last month is a provision that ends the use of the program to determine levels of poverty-based funding for school districts after next year. Instead, the state’s textbook assistance program, which provides free schoolbooks to low-income children, will be used to calculate how much additional money the state gives schools to help educate children most at-risk for failure…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty