Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

We examine whether expanding access to free lunch to all students in high-poverty schools affects the use of suspensions. Under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), schools serving sufficiently high-poverty populations may enroll their entire student bodies in free lunch and breakfast programs, extending free meals to some students who would not qualify individually and potentially decreasing the stigma associated with free meals. We use school discipline measures from the Civil Rights Data Collection and rely on the timing of pilot implementation across states to assess how disciplinary infractions evolve within a school as it is eligible to join CEP. We conclude that the program decreased the use of out-of-school suspension nationally. These results are sensitive to the inclusion of a small set of large school districts with high baseline suspension rates, some of which contemporaneously implemented school discipline reforms.