AB 292: Pupil nutrition: free or reduced-price meals: adequate time to eat.

(1)Existing law requires each school district or county superintendent of schools maintaining kindergarten or any of grades 1 to 12, inclusive, to provide one nutritionally adequate free or reduced-price meal for each needy pupil during each schoolday, except as specified. Existing law authorizes a school district or county office of education to use funds made available through any applicable federal or state program or to use its own funds to provide the required meals.

This bill would express legislative intent that schools provide pupils with adequate time to eat lunch during the schoolday. The bill would require school districts, in addition to providing a nutritionally adequate free or reduced-price meal for each needy pupil each schoolday, to ensure that each of the schools in their respective jurisdictions makes available to its pupils adequate time to eat after being served lunch. The bill would declare that the State Department of Education specifies that an adequate time to eat school lunch is 20 minutes after being served. The bill would require a school that determines, upon annual review of its bell schedule, that it is currently not providing pupils with adequate time to eat, to identify and develop a plan to implement, in consultation with the school district, ways to increase pupils time to eat lunch. To the extent this requirement would create new duties for schools and school districts, it would constitute a state-mandated local program.

The bill would specify that, in order to comply with its requirements requiring adequate time for pupils to eat after being served, the appropriate school food authority may, to the extent that funds are available, use may use available federally or state-regulated nonprofit school food service cafeteria accounts to defray any costs allowable under the federal National School Lunch Program and in accordance with that funding source before considering other funding streams federal and state law.

The bill would also make nonsubstantive changes to these provisions.

(2)The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement.

This bill would provide that, if the Commission on State Mandates determines that the bill contains costs mandated by the state, reimbursement for those costs shall be made pursuant to these statutory provisions.