FNS Documents & Resources

USDA is implementing regulatory changes to the SFSP that simplify program requirements and improve the customer experience.

FNS published a final rule on program integrity to ensure that child nutrition programs are properly operated and managed to protect federal funds and taxpayer dollars.

This guidance memo addresses sponsors’ monitoring requirements of its sites and food service operations in the SFSP. This guidance applies to sponsors’ management responsibilities of conducting initial site visits and full reviews of food service, including visits of non-congregate rural meal sites.

This memorandum provides best practices for state agencies for using appropriate documentation for claim validation for self-preparation sites and ensuring claims are properly payable in the Summer Food Service Program.

The purpose of this memorandum is to provide guidance for state agencies and program operators on aspects of the final rule that aligned the SFSP with other child nutrition programs: performance standards, budgets, and management plans.

This webinar provides an overview of USDA child nutrition programs’ final rule, Streamlining Program Requirements and Improving Integrity in the Summer Food Service Program.

The purpose of this memorandum is to extend to the at-risk afterschool component of the Child and Adult Care Food Program the flexibility to take certain food items offsite.

This report responds to the requirement of PL 110-246 to assess the effectiveness of state and local efforts to directly certify children for free school meals. Direct certification is a process conducted by the states and by local educational agencies to certify eligible children for free meals without the need for household applications. 

Statistical models were designed to estimate national improper payments due to certification error on an annual basis using district-level data. This enables FNS to update its estimates of national improper payment rates for the NSLP and SBP in future years without having to conduct full rounds of primary data collection.

The second Access, Participation, Eligibility and Certification Study (APEC II) included a follow-on report that provided statistically-derived state-level estimates of school meals erroneous payments. However, while APEC II provided a rough indicator of relative risk for groups of states (e.g., higher than average, about average, lower than average), it was not a state-representative direct measure, and creating actual annual measures of such erroneous payments at the state level using APEC methodology is cost-prohibitive. This report explores alternative approaches to developing measurement-based state-specific estimates that are responsive to year-to-year changes in the actual underlying rate in each state. It also provides cost and burden estimates for the implementation of each of these methods.