JENNINGS — Fewer students will go hungry this fall in Jeff Davis Parish with the expansion of a federally funded program to provide free meals to students.

Free breakfasts and lunches are being provided to all students at Elton Elementary, James Ward Elementary, Welsh Elementary and Lake Arthur Elementary under the Community Eligibility Child Nutrition Provision program.

Changes approved by the School Board last week will expand the program to allow all students at Jennings High, Welsh-Roanoke and Lake Arthur High to receive free breakfast and lunches regardless of household income and eligibility.

Fenton Elementary will be dropped from the program, but qualifying students will continue to be offered free or reduced-price meals based on income eligibility guidelines.

Superintendent Kirk Credeur said the program allows schools with at least 40 percent of the student population considered low-income to feed all students at no cost to families and without requiring families to complete applications.

Schools that adopt the program are reimbursed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help offset the cost of providing the meals, Credeur said.

“We have been doing this at some of our schools, and it has been very advantageous,” Credeur said. “The rate of reimbursement for those lunches is higher for us than the old way, which means that we were being able to be closer to break-even on the school lunch program.”

Credeur noted that no school lunch program is self-sufficient and that all of them have to be supplemented by the general fund to be viable.

“The school lunch program is set up where nobody ever breaks even because if we truly charged students for what it cost to totally fund that meal its significantly more than what we are charging them,” he said.

“But by participating in the Community Eligibility Child Nutrition Provision program, the amount the School Board has to supplement is greatly reduced.”

When the School Board started looking at the program in 2015, some schools were initially included because they had high economically disadvantaged students, but had low participation.

“But by grouping schools in a different way and adding some and removing Fenton, we are able to generate almost $400,000 more for the school district,” Credeur said.

“While I’m sad that we have to discontinue Fenton and it was an advantage for those 26 families, from an economic standpoint we have to go the other route because it produces hundreds of thousands of dollars to help us continue to offset the cost that we need.”

Students at Fenton will have to complete applications to determine eligibility for free or reduced-price meals for the 2017-2018 school year.