Despite ranking amongst the richest nations in the world, food insecurity is an issue that persists for a non-trivial portion of the United States.  A gap in adequate childhood food security has given rise to a number of weekend feeding programs, which provide children with food at school on Fridays to sustain them through the weekend.  This study uses data from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center linked to program enrollment data collected from the BackPack programs serving Northwestern North Carolina. 

With particular attention paid to endogenous program adoption, a difference-in-difference and triple difference approach is utilized to identify how these programs affect student performance on end-of-year exams, attendance, and behavioral incidents.  This approach exploits the fact that program participants are a subset of free/reduced lunch eligible students.  The group of free/reduced lunch eligible students is compared across time and to ineligible students at schools with a program, and across schools with and without a program.  Positive effects will have implications on our understanding of how food insecurity interacts with childhood development.