Sunday’s Charlotte Observer ran a story on questionable free and reduced-price lunch numbers, a topic covered extensively by Carolina Journal.
it raised the issue of fraud in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, a firestorm of controversy in 2008 when some school board members called for a comprehensive audit of F&R lunch participants:
Some say the lunch-aid data are too shaky to form the foundation for such spending. Eligibility is based on self-reported family income, and the small sample of applications that are checked typically turn up problems.
For instance, CMS’ most recent check of 236 applications found 30, or 13 percent, that weren’t eligible. And 36 families, or 15 percent, didn’t respond to the request for documentation.
If 13 percent to 28 percent of all students getting the aid were not really eligible, that would translate to roughly 9,600 to 20,700 students inaccurately tallied as “poor.”
