At the rural school district I last worked at, we had 1500 students, of whom 1,000 were free lunch and 500 were not. The cost of personnel (an entire department!), computers, and software for vetting students to make sure those 500 didn't get free lunch cost more than the cost of simply feeding them, already.

The GOP jihad about preventing those 500 from getting free lunch is not about taxes or expense, it's about being mean to children. #gop #antichild #school #lunch #meanness

@badtux Would you be able to elaborate on why it took an entire department? Are there complicated requirements surrounding free lunches?
@orman Basically, a kid qualified for free lunch either if a) his parents participated in various poverty programs, or b) if he was income-verified by our free lunch department. And each kid had to have his own individual application validated against Fed poverty program lists, and if he was not on the list from the Feds, we had to validate his income via income tax forms or etc. And the Fed lists rarely exactly matched the data in our enrollment records so we had to do extensive validation.