The purpose of this memorandum is to provide guidance regarding onsite and offsite strategies and options for oversight and monitoring of the school meal programs.
This study—authorized by the 2010 Child Nutrition Act—tests innovative strategies to end childhood hunger.
FNS developed the Access, Participation, Eligibility and Certification (APEC) study series, which collects and analyzes data from a nationally representative sample of schools and school food authorities (SFAs) about every 5 years. APEC allows FNS to develop a national estimate of erroneous payment rates and amounts in three key areas: certification error, meal claiming error and aggregation error. FNS recently completed APEC II, which collected data in School Year 2012-2013 and this report summarizes those findings.