NOTE: Figures are percentages of students in schools where over 50 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The National School Lunch Program is a federally assisted meal program. To be eligible, a student must be from a household with an income at or below 130 percent of the poverty threshold for free lunch or between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty threshold for reduced-price lunch. Approximately 13,704 public schools did not report information on the number of students eligible for a free or reduced-price school lunch. Therefore, this information is missing for 5,227,075 public school students. Race/ethnicity categories exclude persons of Hispanic origin unless otherwise specified. For a comparison of poverty definitions, see appendix B.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), "Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey," 2003–04.