Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

All Coffee County School students will receive free breakfast and lunch during the 2025-2026 school year using the federal Community Eligibility Provision program with approval from new Director of Schools Scott Hargrove.

Coffee County Director of School Nutrition Carlan Cotten gave a presentation to the School Board at the June 9 meeting on how the program works.

The CEP is a school breakfast and lunch program through the USDA that offers meals to all enrolled students at schools in high poverty areas at no cost without collecting household applications.

“I met with Mr. Hargrove, and we decided this is something we supported, and we both wanted to do it,” Cotten explained during the presentation. “We discussed all the good and bad, and we decided that we should try CEP for a year and pilot it and then reevaluate at the end of next year and see if it is fiscally viable.”

Numbers submitted for the CEP program work on a four-year cycle. Schools can remove themselves from the program at any time and can start a new cycle if numbers increase.

“So, if next year we’ve lost a ton of money and it looks like we’re not going to be able to maintain, then we can go back, but it may be something I can look at the numbers again and get a better number,” said Cotten.

Schools that adopt the program are reimbursed using a formula based on the percentage of students who automatically qualified for free meals based on their household’s participation in means-based programs, such as SNAP, or their status as a foster, homeless, migrant or runaway child.

The state divides the number of students who qualified through those programs by the total number of students enrolled in the school system and then multiplies it by 100 to find the Identified Student Percentage.

Coffee County’s ISP is 50.67%, and the threshold for eligibility is over 25%.

No vote was required by the Board as the program only needs approval from the acting School Director. Board action is only required if funds need to be moved to cover any potential funding shortages.

Cotten noted that Nutrition has a fund balance that can cover any shortages, but said she did not anticipate having to use the fund balance.

The program only applies to breakfast and lunch. Students will have to pay for any a la carte items sold in the cafeteria.