newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOHN SOLTES

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

New Jersey Sen. Michael Doherty (R-23) has his eye on trimming the fat from the state’s school lunch program. The first dilemma: How much fat is there?

Speaking before a group of Tea Party supporters on Nov. 3, Doherty, a member of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, insisted that 37 percent of all school lunch recipients are ineligible, according to The Star-Ledger.

After fielding criticism that his numbers exaggerated the potential fraud, Doherty recently said he stands behind his math. “The amount of fraud in the free and reduced school lunch program is massive and the cost to the taxpayers is enormous,” the senator stated, according to a statement on his website. “It runs in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The National School Lunch Program, administered through the state Department of Agriculture’s Division of Food and Nutrition, seeks to provide a “well-balanced lunch for children in order to promote sound eating habits, to foster good health and academic achievement and to reinforce the nutrition education taught in the classroom.” Most public, private and child care institutions are open to apply.

The program works on a reimbursement basis. Districts receive money for every student eligible for a free or reduced lunch. However, the eligibility requirements, based mostly on income reporting at the district level, apparently have as many holes as a piece of Swiss cheese.

In New Jersey, in order to receive a free lunch, a family of four needs to have an annual income of less than $29,055. Families of two are eligible if their income falls below $19,123, according to documents from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the national program. The thresholds are not as restrictive for reduced lunch plans: $41,348 and less for families of four, $27,214 and less for two-person families.

The New Jersey Auditor reported earlier this year that approximately 428,000 students in the state are enrolled in the lunch program. Of those student applications, 3 percent are verified by officials, as is mandated by the federal government. Those applications deemed “error prone” are the first to be verified. From this test pool, approximately 37 percent were deemed ineligible.

Despite the seemingly high error rate, New Jersey is actually in line with the rest of the nation. Across the United States, approximately 40 percent of verified applicants are found ineligible.

“Income and household composition reporting inaccuracies lead to significant eligibility error rates in the department’s National School Lunch Program, which would impact funding for other state programs,” the auditor noted.

In total, the agency’s findings estimate that statewide there are nearly 60,000 students defrauding the lunch program.

In response to the findings, Douglas H. Fisher, secretary of the state Department of Agriculture, told the auditor that New Jersey is compliant and the agency can do no more to address the problem.

“Federal regulation mandates local education agencies verify 3 percent of the applications approved,” Fisher wrote the auditor in a letter dated June 23. “The audit report acknowledges this regulation is being met. Federal regulation requires remaining applications be accepted at face value.”

Doherty claims that “face value” is not enough.

“Under New Jersey’s system for funding schools, enrolling a student in the free and reduced price lunch program triggers an ‘At Risk’ designation for the student, which results in about an additional $5,000 of state school aid under New Jersey’s school funding formula,” the senator reported. “It’s a lot of money that could be used to reduce property taxes statewide.”

John Soltes is an award-winning freelance journalist based in New Jersey. He currently serves as publisher of Hollywood Soapbox (www.HollywoodSoapbox.com). E-mail him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .