El Dorado schools offer free meals to all students, thanks to the Community Eligibility Provision Program

Emily Gosvenor, EHS Hi-Gusher Staff

Thanks to the Community Eligibility Provision Program, El Dorado schools offer free breakfast and lunch for the attending 2020-2021 school year, possibly for the next four.

 

The Community Eligibility Provision Program is a meal service program, enabling schools across the country to give free lunch and breakfast to enrolled students of schools that have a percentage of need that’s high enough. Until last year, every school in El Dorado had a high enough percentage of need besides El Dorado High School; but that’s changed this year.

 

Kimberly Newman, the New Director of Child Nutrition and past teacher here at EHS, said, “We saw this yearn our percentage of need rise to where it needed to be.” All students enrolled in the El Dorado School District are now offered free meals.

 

However, Newman said she’s not the one to thank. Rather, she credits the past Director of Child Nutrition, Grace George. She was the one who started and qualified all the other schools for CEP, but was waiting on the percentage of need to go up for the high school. Newman says George “put everything in place, and I was the one who got to announce it.”

 

EHS is now eligible for free meals for the next four years, and at the end of the four years the percentage of need will be reevaluated.