Free meals at 13 Annandale/Mason schools
Fairfax County Public Schools will continue to provide free breakfasts and lunches during the 2022-23 school year at 34 schools, including these schools in the Annandale/Mason District area.
- Annandale High School
- Annandale Terrace Elementary School
- Bailey’s Elementary
- Bailey’s Upper Elementary
- Beech Tree Elementary
- Braddock Elementary
- Glasgow Middle School
- Glen Forest Elementary
- Justice High School
- Parklawn Elementary
- Poe Middle School
- Sleepy Hollow Elementary
- Weyanoke Elementary
The free meals are available to all students regardless of household income. Families with students in the participating schools do not have to submit an application.
The free breakfasts and lunches are supported by the Community Eligibility Provision of the federal Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.
At non-participating schools, homeless children, foster children, and children in households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (SNAP) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families may be automatically eligible for free meals.
Children in households participating in the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program may also be eligible for free or reduced-price meals based on the household’s income.
Families who earn less than 130 percent of the poverty level are eligible for free meals and those with incomes between 130 and 185 percent of the poverty level qualify for reduced-price meals. Families can apply here.
As of Oct. 31, 2021, approximately 31 percent of FCPS students qualified for free or reduced-price meals.
The Free/Reduced-price Meal (FRM) Program is so important, not just for nutrition but because it allows students to access other support such as subsidies for band instruments, sports fees, and discounts to Fairfax County Park classes. Even if your child is at a school with free meals for the entire student body, it can be important to complete the paperwork for FRM!
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
What does it say about the socioeconomic status of Annandale with so many schools listed? Are Annandale schools moving up, or becoming ghetto. With the last boundary changes of FCPS, it appears Annandale schools have been relegated to ghetto. The abundance of taxpayer school lunch compounds this. It would be nice to get SOL data by county district then cross walk that with census socioeconomic data by district. My theory is last superintendent treated Annandale like a ghetto, compounded by country council. Hope I’m wrong but every day I interact in the schools reinforces this observation.
First, please don’t use the word free. Nothing is free. The food maybe donated, but most likely it is a part of the school budget which means it comes from our taxes. A better word may be subsidized. And please don’t tell me that the money used to pay for it is free because some of it comes from the federal government, because guess what. We pay taxes for that also.
I don’t deny the need to provide for those less fortunate, but my parents bought me no name clothing because they could not afford name brand. These kids are in Abercrombie & Fitch. Maybe they don’t need the “free” meals as much as they need parents who can budget and be frugal, as my parents were and as I was in raising four children.
Then they can pay their way like the immigrant families of old, who may not have had much, but they had their dignity.