This report responds to the requirement of PL 110-246 to assess the effectiveness of state and local efforts to directly certify children for free school meals. Direct certification is a process conducted by the states and by local educational agencies to certify eligible children for free meals without the need for household applications.
This study uses calendar year 2011 point-of-sale transaction data from a leading grocery retailer to examine the food choices of SNAP and non-SNAP households . On average, each month's transaction data contained over 1 billion records of food items bought by 26.5 million households in 127 million unique transactions.
This study examined the feasibility of creating a data collection system capable of directly and automatically providing USDA with item-level data on purchases made by SNAP households. Data would be captured at the point of sale from purchases made using EBT cards.
This is the 11th in a series of annual reports that examines the administrative accuracy of eligibility determinations and benefit issuance for free or reduced-price meals in the National School Lunch Program.
This report assesses that pilot and includes a qualitative evaluation of the vendor and ITO experiences and an assessment of pilot costs.
This study describes some of the choices state agencies made as they exercised the flexibility offered during the implementation and describes the resulting food packages.
This study identifies how spending patterns, such as the rate at which households spend their benefit, changed following the ARRA benefit increase and analyzes how spending patterns differed across household characteristics, time and states.