FNS Documents & Resources

Section 17 of the National School Lunch Act, authorizes the Child and Adult Care Program. Under this program, the Secretary of Agriculture is authorized to provide cash reimbursement and commodity assistance, on a per meal basis, for food service to children in nonresidential child care centers and family or group day care homes, and to eligible adults in nonresidential adult day care centers. 

The purpose of this memorandum is to strongly encourage local educational agencies to accept eligibility determinations from a transferring student’s former LEA to minimize disruptions in meal benefits for low-income students and avoid student debt resulting from unpaid meal charges.

There has been confusion about how unpaid meal charges must be handled when all collection efforts have been exhausted. To help address these situations, this memorandum clarifies the processes of designating delinquent debt that has been determined to be uncollectable as bad debt and obtaining assistance to offset bad debt losses.

The purpose of this memorandum is to address the need for school food authorities participating in the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program to institute and clearly communicate a meal charge policy, which would include, if applicable, the availability of alternate meals.

In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, this notice invites the general public and other public agencies to comment on the proposed collection. This is a revision of a currently approved collection codified by SNAP regulations at 7 CFR 274.6(b)(5) and 274.6(b)(6).

In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service  invites the general public and other public agencies to comment on this proposed information collection. This is a new collection for the purpose of learning about the types of SNAP related fraud activity observed by large retailers and the methods they use to prevent fraud and minimize their losses.