# What the Expanding Access to School Meals Act Does

This bill makes two major changes to how school meals work: it eliminates the reduced-price meal option entirely and expands who qualifies for free meals. Right now, schools offer three tiers of meals—free for the poorest families, reduced price for those making a bit more, and full price for everyone else. This bill gets rid of the middle tier completely and pushes more families into the free meal category.

The first big change eliminates reduced-price breakfasts and lunches. Currently, families earning between 130% and 185% of the poverty line pay a small amount for meals—usually just a few dollars per meal. Under this bill, that reduced-price option disappears. Schools would no longer offer meals at a discount; instead, families in that income range would either qualify for completely free meals or pay full price. The bill raises the income threshold for free meals from 130% of the poverty line to 200%, which means more families automatically qualify for free meals instead of having to pay a reduced price.

The bill also makes it easier for schools to identify eligible students without requiring families to fill out applications. Schools can now directly check with Medicaid agencies to see which children are enrolled in Medicaid and automatically enroll those kids in free meals. Additionally, the bill allows schools to go back and correct previous meal claims retroactively—so if a child becomes eligible partway through the school year, the school can recalculate what they're owed for meals served earlier that year. Finally, the bill increases the "community eligibility program multiplier" from 1.6 to 2.5, which is a technical change that makes it easier for schools in low-income areas to provide free meals to all their students without individual applications.