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NJ schools skipping mandate to serve breakfast, group says By the start of the 2019 academic year, 661 New Jersey schools with a high percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals were required by state law to provide breakfast daily to their students once the school day began. But new findings from a state-by-state report suggest many New Jersey schools did not abide by that mandate. Get our free mobile app According to a report released by the Food Research & Action Center, New Jersey experienced an 8% drop in the number of low-income children who received a free or discou...

Free summer meals soar in NJ during COVID — will it continue? In a summer featuring a global pandemic, more than 9 million free meals were handed out by schools and community organizations to Garden State children who may have otherwise struggled to get their hands on nutritious food — during July 2020 alone. According to a report released Thursday by Hunger Free New Jersey, the number of meals distributed in summer 2020 nearly tripled 2019's numbers, and the number of children reached increased twofold, through the use of federal child nutrition programs. The COVID-19 pandemic was a larg...

Credit: USDAgov via Creative Commons CC-PDM-1.0 In order to reach more hungry families, some summer-meal programs are allowing parents to pick up food rather than requiring kids to eat it on site. New Jersey schools and community organizations fed twice the number of children last summer than the year before, providing meals to many who may have gone hungry otherwise due to the pandemic’s effect on families and on typical summer children’s programs. Recognizing those great needs, more communities participated in federal summer-meal programs than before. The waiver of some rules due to the...

Decline in NJ school meal service during early months of the pandemic Many New Jersey school districts have been offering free meals to all families during the pandemic. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture has relaxed rules to make it easier for schools to feed children during remote learning, including allowing districts to deliver meals directly to homes, provide meals at pickup or drive-through locations and deliver meals along bus routes.  Nevertheless, the number of free and low-cost school lunches served to children in the state — and the number of children served — plunged 51% ...

Plenty of New Jersey school districts have been offering free meals to families during the coronavirus pandemic, but a new report suggests many kids aren't actually getting their hands on this food. According to data from the Food Research & Action Center, the number of free and low-cost school lunches served to New Jersey children, as well as the number of children served, plummeted 51% from April 2019 to April 2020. Breakfast participation dropped 36% during that time frame. "We definitely expected the number of meals and kids served would go down, but not that much — that's a huge drop,"...