School Breakfast Program - Participation and Meals Served

This data provides historical summaries of total participation and meals served as part of the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) School Breakfast Program. The summary data begins in 1969, the year that FNS was established to administer USDA's nutrition assistance program.

The School Breakfast Program is a federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. It began as a pilot project in 1966, and was made permanent in 1975. The School Breakfast Program is administered at the Federal level by the Food and Nutrition Service. At the State level, the program is usually administered by State education agencies, which operate the program through agreements with local school food authorities in more than 89,000 schools and institutions.

School districts and independent schools that choose to take part in the breakfast program receive cash subsidies from the USDA for each meal they serve. In return, they must serve breakfasts that meet Federal requirements, and they must offer free or reduced price breakfasts to eligible children.

Any child at a participating school may purchase a meal through the School Breakfast Program. Children from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the Federal poverty level are eligible for free meals. Those with incomes between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level are eligible for reduced-price meals.

Resources in this dataset:
Resource Title: School Breakfast Participation and Meals Served Data.
File Name: sbsummar.xls
Resource Description: Data are provided by federal fiscal year rather than calendar or school year. This includes the months of October through September. The total participation numbers for this data is based on a nine month average: October - May plus September.

Resource Title: School Breakfast Participation and Meals Served Data.
File Name: SchoolBreakfasts2.csv
Resource Description: Data are provided by federal fiscal year rather than calendar or school year. This includes the months of October through September. The total participation numbers for this data is based on a nine month average: October - May plus September.

Participation and meals served numbers are counted in millions, and the free/reduced price meals is a percentage of total meals. 2] in the reduced price column indicates that these numbers were included with the free participation numbers.

Resource Title: Data Dictionary.
File Name: Data Dictionary_SchoolBreakfastParticipationMealsServed.csv