SNAP and the School Meal Programs. University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series, DP2013-08

The Great Recession and its immediate aftermath have brought increasing attention both to food insecurity among children and to the associated food safety net. This report examines how the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) functions as a component of the broader food assistance safety net for school-age children, focusing on connections between SNAP and the school meal programs at a policy level, as well patterns in children's participation across programs. It is divided into two parts. Part I provides an overview of the programs, highlighting both geographic variability in each of the programs, as well as structural features that create explicit, as well as potentially unintended, linkages between them. Part II uses recent national data to formally explore the role of the combined food assistance safety net for school-age children during and immediately after the Great Recession -- a period in which the demands placed on food assistance programs for children reached historic highs. The report concludes by discussing implications of both the programmatic linkages and the empirical patterns of participation for policy and research.