The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a win for students, families, and schools. 

CEP gives all students access to the nutritious school breakfasts and lunches they need to be well-nourished and ready to learn, while reducing the stigma often present in school cafeterias when schools have to track students’ eligibility for free, reduced-price, and paid meals. When students have access to free meals at school, families have lower grocery bills and more money in their household budgets to help make ends meet.  

In the 2024-2025 school year, over 54,000 schools used CEP to bring the benefits of free school meals to more than 27 million children nationwide; however, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts recently enacted in the Budget Reconciliation Law (H.R. 1) puts CEP at risk. The SNAP cuts will exacerbate food insecurity and have ripple effects for the school meals programs, including threatening schools’ ability to implement CEP. As children lose access to SNAP, their automatic eligibility for free school meals is severed and federal reimbursement for meals served in CEP schools decreases, jeopardizing the program’s financial viability and children’s access to free school meals. 

Congress must act now to repeal SNAP cuts and invest in CEP.  Find the impact of CEP in your state from the table below. 

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado
Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii
Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky
Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota
Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire
New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio
Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota
Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington
West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

Technical Note:  

The Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) utilized 2024-2025 CEP participation data and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data for this analysis. FRAC obtained 2024–2025 CEP participation data from state agencies that administer the federal school nutrition programs. For more information on this data collection, please refer to FRAC’s 2025 report, Community Eligibility: The Key to Hunger-Free Schools School Year 2024-2025. CBPP obtained congressional district data from NCES. School districts, rather than individual schools, are listed under congressional districts. If a school district crosses congressional district boundaries, all of their schools and children are included in each congressional district. Not all school districts could be matched to congressional districts due to inconsistencies in how the data sources numerically identify and name school districts and schools. Unmatched school districts are listed as unassigned.