Impact of the community eligibility provision program on school meal participation in Texas.

Objective: To estimate the impact of opting into the community eligibility provision (CEP) on school meal participation among students in Texas.

Design: A quasi-experimental design using a two-way fixed effects panel difference-in-difference model and the variation in adoption timing to estimate the impact of opting into CEP on student breakfast and lunch participation in eligible, ever-adopting schools.

Setting: All public and charter K-12 schools in Texas participating in national school meals (breakfast and/or lunch) from 2013 to 2019 who are eligible for the CEP program in at least 1 year and choose to opt into the program in at least 1 year (n 2797 unique schools and 16 103 school-years).

Participants: School-level administrative data from the Texas Department of Agriculture on meal counts, enrollment and summary characteristics of students merged with district-level educational and socio-demographic data from the Texas Education Authority.

Results: We find opting into CEP increased school breakfast participation by 4·59 percentage points (P < 0·001) and lunch participation by 4·32 percentage points (P < 0·001), on average. The effect is slightly larger (4·64 and 4·61, respectively) and still statistically significant when excluding summer months.

Conclusion: Our findings suggest that opting into CEP modestly increases school meal participation in Texas, with a similar impact on breakfast and lunch.