For nearly a year, students in the Gainesville City Schools system have been getting free lunch and, according to officials, it has saved the system money.

Last September, the system decided to apply for Provision 2 Meals. For systems that have high rates of students who receive free and reduced-price lunch rates, the program provides free meals to all students and the school system gets reimbursed for the majority of the costs.

According to Tiffany Lommel, food service director for the system, about 76 percent of students in the city qualify for free and reduced-price lunches.

In the old program, those students’ parents would have to fill out paperwork proving they qualified. Lommel said it would take months for system staff to go through some 15,000 applications it received each year. Now, that paperwork is eliminated.

“I think it’s been a really positive program,” Lommel said. “It’s been wonderful for the students. Our volume has increased, so we do have more student customers and, in addition to that, it has reduced a lot of the paperwork.”

She added that another benefit is that the school meals are often healthier than what students may bring from
home.

She said the money generated from students paying for lunch was $110,000 the year before the new program kicked in — about 3 percent of the department’s total budget.

“We were spending more staff and more money on labor to handle the paperwork than what we were actually receiving from our students,” said Lommel.

Before, the system was reimbursed based on each purchased lunch, with $2.80 for those students qualified for free lunch, $2.35 for reduced-price lunch and $0.28 for a paid lunch.

Now, the system basically takes a picture every four years of what percentage of students are purchasing each type of lunch, and it is reimbursed for that percentage, rather than counting lunches every day. The percentage is measured on how many students overall buy lunch each month.

The director said it costs the system about $2.40 to prepare each meal.

“I think it’s been very successful,” said Lommel. “If you look at our high school alone, we went from feeding about 750 students and now we’re up to 900 there. Once you’re preparing food for hundreds of students, preparing for another 200 is not really a big deal.”

Gainesville City Schools has participated in a free breakfast program for all students since 2003.

Other districts in the state using the program include Greene, Burke and Emanuel counties, as well as some Marietta city schools.