ALBEMARLE — For the 2024-25 school year, all Stanly County Schools students are eligible to receive a free breakfast and lunch each school day.
The school system announced on Aug. 1 that the free meal program — limited to elementary students last year — will once again operate through the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) as part of the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program.
Under the implementation of the CEP program, there will not be a need to submit meal applications for free, reduced-price, and paid student meals; all a la carte items, snacks, and beverages are still available for purchase.
At the recent Stanly County Board of Education meeting on Aug. 6, SCS Superintendent Dr. Jarrod Dennis presented a summary of the program to school board members.
“Essentially, we had CEP for our elementary students last year, but now all students have CEP,” Dennis said. “We had a phone call go out Monday about this and we’re just trying to raise awareness.”
Dennis stated that participation will be a crucial element to the successfulness of the program.
“We want to make sure that all our kids have two meals a day when they go to school,” he added. “On Monday through Friday, they can count on two meals a day and don’t have to worry about meal debt. Hopefully, this will ease the burden on working families, especially ones who live paycheck to paycheck. Now, you can use some of that money to do other things instead of worrying about having to feed your kids at school.”
Board Member Glenda Gibson asked the superintendent whether students who bring their own lunches to school would need to go through the lunch line with everyone else.
Dennis said that he told principals and administration during the latest summer retreat that students with lunch boxes will be asked to sit them down and still enter the lunch line.
“Even if they just get one item, they’re still helping with the participation rate. They were told that at our summer leadership meeting.”
Regarding the breakfast portion of the CEP program, Dennis said that breakfast would be “trickier” and that the specifics will look different depending on each individual school.
Board Chair Carla Poplin floated the idea of asking the Stanly school district bus drivers to remind students that they can get their free breakfast to take to their respective classrooms in the morning.
“I wanted to also just reiterate that our cafeteria staff are allotted hours by how many meals we feed,” Poplin said. “If we’re short a worker — and one feeds 50 to 60 more kids at that school each day — that may make up those hours and it would make life easier on our Child Nutrition Department too.”
At future meetings, the school board will be updated on the participation and implementation statistics throughout the SCS school district.
“Not only does this give our kids hot meals twice a day at no cost to parents, but it also helps make our employment situation more stable,” Poplin continued. “There are multiple reasons for implementing this program and I’m super excited that we’re going to have two hot meal options for our kids each day at every school. We just want to make sure that we’re marketing and pushing it so that we don’t start off behind with not enough participation.”
The Stanly County Board of Education is scheduled to hold its next regular meeting on Sept. 3 at 6:15 p.m. inside Central Elementary School’s auxiliary meeting room.