Who: Missouri sponsors of the federal Summer Service Food Program (SFSP)
What:
Sponsors looking to serve more children in the SFSP through increasing sites can better plan with a variety of online tools.
Under SFSP, sponsor organizations can operate one or more sites where food is served free to children between May and August. Sponsors are responsible for administration of the program (including filing regular claims with the state of Missouri to collect reimbursements).
Organizations interested in serving summer meals can participate as either sponsors or sites. Some organizations, for example, operate as both sponsor and site in all locations; others may team up with other organizations.
Site organizations typically have less paperwork responsibilities than sponsors. For this reason, some teams that are new to SFSP opt to partner with experienced sponsors.
Sponsors, then, may have success in recruiting new organizations to operate sites or setting up brand-new sites on their own.
Since not every community or location in Missouri is area-eligible for SFSP, sponsor organizations can improve their planning process by leveraging existing free online resources.
These include:
- The USDA Capacity Builder can help you locate existing SFSP sponsors and sites, as well as locations friendly to children, like parks, libraries and museums.
- The USDA Area Eligibility map can help you find sites that are eligible due to Census data. Note: There is a second category of areas eligible for SFSP — those that fall in the attendance zone of a school with 50% or more students enrolled in free or reduced school meals.
- Share Our Strength’s Averaged Eligibility map is a secondary (but important) way to check for area eligibility. This map shows Census tracks which are area-eligible for the SFSP by virtue of the level of need in nearby Census tracks (for more detailed information about average eligibility, click here). There are some communities in Missouri which appear ineligible on the USDA map, but still qualify under the USDA’s average-eligibility rules and will appear so on this map.
- The Missouri Public School Directory and the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE)’s food and nutrition statistics webpage can help smaller districts with a third way to determine if a site is area-eligible. An SFSP site is area-eligible if located within the area of attendance of a public school in which half or more of the students are enrolled in USDA’s free or reduced school meals programs.
Steps:
- Review meal counts, costs and other information from the last summer your organization participated in SFSP. Which areas had high participation? Which lagged?
- -Study the USDA Capacity Builder for your community. Are there any organizations where children gather in the summer (parks, museums, libraries)?
- Cross-check the USDA Area Eligibility Map and the Share Our Strength Averaged Eligibility Maps. Is the site eligible based on either of these maps?
- If not, you can check Missouri Department of Education data. This can help identify sites that are eligible due to being in the attendance area of a school with 50% or more students enrolled in free or reduced school meal programs.
- First, find your location in the Missouri Public School Directory, which shows boundaries of the state’s public school districts. Note that public school districts can cover multiple counties and/or cities.
- Next, find the school in the state’s list of school buildings by free and reduced percentages of enrollment. At the time of this writing, Missouri allows potential sponsors to cite data from School Year 2019-2020.
