Massachusetts alters calculation for low-income students

State education officials are no longer using free and reduced lunch numbers to publicly report school districts’ low-income student populations.

But that doesn’t mean local school districts, like Fall River, are necessarily planning to stop collecting lunch applications any time soon.

For years, the way Fall River and other school districts determined their numbers around low-income students had been through those lunch applications.

According to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, using school lunch data in that manner has been has been a long-standing practice. Now the state is using a new measure, with a new name: “economically disadvantaged.”

The DESE will no longer report free and reduced lunch statistics. Instead, it will derive “economically disadvantaged” numbers based on “direct certification,” which derives students’ low-income status based upon their families’ enrollment in federal and state assistance programs.

Those programs include the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — better known as SNAP — and state programs like the Transitional Assistance for Families with Dependent Children, the Department of Children and Families’ foster care program and MassHealth.

A review of the new data confirms this. Data collected in Fall River and other similarly sized urban districts show differences greater than 20 percentage points between the current number of students considered “economically disadvantaged” and those who previously qualified for free/reduced lunch. A comparison of data from suburban communities surrounding Fall River shows a less significant decline, 10 percentage points and less.

State education officials acknowledged in the report there would be a shift in numbers:

“Obviously this has nothing to do with any real changes in family income; it is simply a shift from one valid measure to another valid measure,” a June 3, 2015 report from the department read. It noted that both sets of data “cannot be directly compared.”