School dis­tricts across the states often use free or reduced cost school lunches to deter­mine poverty in their dis­tricts. For the state of Cal­i­for­nia, the stu­dents apply­ing for free meals has increased at a dra­matic rate, the largest increase in a decade.

From the Palo Alto Online, writer Chris Ken­rick looks at a new report issued from the Lucile Packard Foundation.

Nearly 19,000 more Cal­i­for­nia chil­dren enrolled in the fed­er­ally sub­si­dized meal pro­gram over the last school year, push­ing the total enroll­ment to 53 per­cent of Cal­i­for­nia pub­lic school stu­dents, accord­ing to the Palo Alto-based Lucile Packard Foun­da­tion for Children’s Health.

Locally, 7.7 per­cent of Palo Alto school chil­dren qual­i­fied for the pro­gram this year, up from 6.6 per­cent in 2007.

In East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, which is served by the Ravenswood City School Dis­trict, 85.2 per­cent of chil­dren qual­i­fied for the pro­gram, up from 84.3 per­cent in 2007.

In Menlo Park and Los Altos, the num­ber of chil­dren qual­i­fy­ing for the pro­gram was less than 5 percent.

Coun­ty­wide, 37.7 per­cent of school chil­dren in Santa Clara County qual­i­fied for the pro­gram, as did 33.7 per­cent of school chil­dren in San Mateo County.

To qual­ify for the fed­eral lunch sub­sidy pro­gram, a child’s fam­ily income must fall below 185 per­cent of the fed­eral poverty level, which is $40,793 for a fam­ily of four in 2009.

The num­bers were made avail­able through Kids­data, a project of the Lucile Packard Foun­da­tion for Children’s Health that aims to pro­vide reli­able data on the health and well-being of chil­dren. Most of the data is from pub­lic sources, though some comes from the foundation’s Bay Area Par­ent Poll.

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