A new report from a Wis­con­sin non-profit finds that 4 out of 10 Wis­con­sin stu­dents need help with afford­ing school lunches. The Wis­con­sin Cen­ter for Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ism study says that the pro­por­tion of chil­dren need­ing free or reduced price lunches has been grow­ing every year this decade.

Reporters Jacob Kush­ner and Kryssy Pease ana­lyzed data from the Wis­con­sin pub­lic schools for their report. Our snip­pet of their story comes from the La Crosse Tri­bune.

The non­profit cen­ter found the pro­por­tion of Wis­con­sin ele­men­tary stu­dents eli­gi­ble for sub­si­dized lunches hit 37.6 per­cent last year, up from 30.3 per­cent in 2000.

The pro­por­tion of low-income stu­dents grew at least two-fold in 47 of 411 pub­lic school dis­tricts dur­ing the period, reflect­ing the toll of the wors­en­ing econ­omy and what some experts call a grow­ing threat to edu­ca­tion in Wisconsin.

This school year, a house­hold of four earn­ing $28,665 or less would qual­ify for free lunch. Fam­i­lies earn­ing $40,793 or less qual­ify for reduced-price lunch.

More than 90 per­cent of the growth in the low-income ele­men­tary stu­dent pop­u­la­tion since 2000 occurred out­side of Mil­wau­kee, the center’s analy­sis found.

Green Bay has the state’s fifth-largest school dis­trict, but its low-income pop­u­la­tion grew by 2,398 ele­men­tary stu­dents, rep­re­sent­ing the largest increase of any school sys­tem. Dis­tricts in Madi­son and Kenosha also added more low-income ele­men­tary stu­dents in the past nine years than Mil­wau­kee, Wisconsin’s largest school district.

Since 2000, the La Crosse School Dis­trict has seen par­tic­i­pa­tion in the sub­si­dized lunch pro­gram rise from 35.5 per­cent to nearly 43 percent.

Like

Unlike