In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, this notice invites the general public and other public agencies to comment on this proposed information collection. This collection is a revision of a currently approved collection to conduct short, quick-turnaround surveys of state and local agencies providing food, education, and other services in the Child Nutrition and Supplemental Nutrition and Safety programs administered at the federal level by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS).
These programs include the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; National School Lunch Program; School Breakfast Program; Special Milk Program; Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program; Summer Food Service Program; Child and Adult Care Food Program; USDA Foods in Schools; Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations; The Emergency Food Assistance Program; and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program.
Abstract
FNS intends to request approval from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for a generic clearance that will allow FNS to conduct short, quick-turnaround surveys of state, local, and tribal agencies and businesses that receive food, funds, and nutrition information through the Child Nutrition and Supplemental Nutrition and Safety Programs.
The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (PL 111-296, Sec. 305) mandates programs under its authorization to cooperate with USDA program research and evaluation activities. Traditionally, FNS conducts large, program-specific studies to collect information on numerous features of each program. Such studies often take several years to complete. Quick response surveys provide a system for rapidly collecting current information on a specific feature or issue, and, therefore, enable FNS to administer the programs more effectively.
The data collection activities under this clearance will include: (1) An annual sample frame data collection and (2) quick-response surveys. The annual sample frame data collection will request contact information from the states for the local agencies within their purview. The quick-response survey data collections will be used to survey key administrators of the SNP at the state, local, and site level to answer policy and implementation questions.
Following standard OMB requirements, FNS will submit a change request to OMB for each data collection activity undertaken under this generic clearance. The respondents will be identified at the time that each change request is submitted to OMB. FNS will provide OMB with the instruments and supporting materials describing the research project and specific pre-testing activities.
This revision makes minor changes to the information collection as originally approved. The USDA Foods in Schools program is included as a separate program, and minor updates to the sample sizes reflect the most recent estimates of the number of state, local and tribal agencies and businesses involved in the programs and the distribution of local-level providers between government agencies and businesses.
The type of information to be collected, the methods of collection, and the frequency of collection will remain the same; however, we have removed references to reminder emails from the burden table. The estimated number of total responses has decreased from 83,582 (250,745 over three years) to 36,515 (109,545 over three years), and the total burden hours estimate has decreased from 11,508 (34,523 hours over three years) to 10,288 (30,864 hours over 3 years).