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Some students not receiving free lunches

By Kelsey Durham

A mix-up surrounding the city’s new free lunch program for middle school students was misinterpreted by districts around the city, resulting in some students being sent to school without a lunch.

And the school was not prepared to serve them one.

The new program included in the city’s budget for the 2014-15 fiscal year allocated $6.25 million for middle school students across the five boroughs to get free lunch from school, an initiative the city hopes to eventually expand to further grades.

But the program only has funding to provide meals for students in standalone middle schools rather than all seventh- and eighth-grade students in every school in New York City, such as K-8 or K-12 schools.

On the first day of school earlier this month, miscommunication between the city and its schools led parents to believe their middle school students in a K-12 school would be getting a meal at lunch time, and many students were sent to school without a lunch of their own.

“Parents were of the understanding that all students would be getting a free lunch, so there was sort of an organized chaos in those first few days when the school had to scramble to figure out what to do for those kids who didn’t have a lunch,” said City Councilman Paul Vallone (D-Bayside). “I have three kids and I know my wife goes crazy trying to figure out the schedule for everything, so parents need to have the right information.”

Since that first day Sept. 4, Vallone said his office has received calls from parents confused about why their child was not part of the free lunch program. When the councilman started to do some research, he discovered that the funding the city’s administration asked for did not cover the schools inside a school, he said.

“These schools were left out of the funding and now we’re just trying to figure out why,” he said.

Vallone said he reached out to Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito (D-Manhattan), whom he said shared his concern with students being left out of the free lunch program. He also brought the issue to Councilman Daniel Dromm (D-Jackson Heights), who serves as chairman of the Council’s Education Committee, and he said the administration is now looking at how the mix-up happened and how it can be prevented next year.

Vallone said since the budget is set in stone for the remainder of the fiscal year, there is no solution to include the rest of the middle school students in the free lunch program for this school year, but he said the Council is working to figure out how much more it would cost the city to make sure every seventh- and eighth-grade student gets a free meal next year.

“It certainly wasn’t intended to hurt kids,” he said. “It was just kind of an unfortunate oversight and now we have to fix it.”

Reach reporter Kelsey Durham at 718-260-4573 or by e-mail at kdurh‌am@cn‌gloca‌l.com.