Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Free and Reduced Price Meals

Help! I'm filling out the FARM application for Sabrina (free and reduced meals, love that it's missing the word "price") and want to know what other foster parents do:

1. Section 1 of the application is for foster kids. It asks "the amount of this child's personal monthly use income." First of all, the grammar doesn't make sense to me, but more importantly, what does this mean? Is this "how much does the agency give you each month for the child?" Or is it "I'm 5 and am just a kid, I have no income"?

2. Section 4 of the application is parent/guardian info. I'm not the guardian, the agency is. And it asks for social security number. I naively don't have too many fears about giving out my social security number (at least in contexts where it makes sense) but am I supposed to fill this section out as a foster parent? And the piece about my income? What do you do?

9 comments:

  1. Her income is definitely 0. A teen with a job would put down that income, for example.
    My understanding is that because she is in foster care, she automatically qualifies, so they shouldn't need any info about your income or SSN. In fact, my instructions say just to fill out part 1 and 2, skip part 3, sign part 4 (but no SSN necessary) and answer part 5 if you choose to. Do we have the same form?

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  2. In my state a foster child is considered their own family for things like that. You can put down the state as the guardian and don't include any income for them. Overall, call the school and let them know to call the agency if they have any questions.

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  3. Her income is zero. After that you shouldn't need to fill out any thing more. She's a foster kid. You're done.

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  5. agree with yondalla, All foster children in our state get "free" luches automatically.

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  8. uh ... should i be flipping because i didn't receive any such form from my foster kiddo's school? he gets free lunch based on mom's income but i haven't gotten a form to fill it out for this year. wuh-oh.

    < / end completely unhelpful comment >

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  9. Bryna, I don't think you need to flip. Where I live, parents are required to fill out the form whether they think their kid is eligible or not. That said, some parents still don't (and I can understand why, since if you make a 6 figure salary, you're not going to want to give that information to the people at school), but by requiring everyone to fill it out, they can maximize the federal dollars that go towards school nutrition. It also is part of the registration/residency verification process that parents have to do EVERY YEAR because our schools are so good (ha!) that we have people pouring in from surrounding areas just dying to fraudulently enroll their kids in our public schools. Um, yeah. And you might get the form after the school year starts.

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