National School Lunch Program Participation and Meals Served

Department of Agriculture data details participation and meals served through the federally assisted National School Lunch Program. It provides information on nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches served to children in public and nonprofit schools and institutions. The dataset was last updated in April 2025.

Use Cases

• Analyze trends in program participation across different states using geographic tags.
• Model the relationship between meals served and factors like school type (public or nonprofit).
• Assess the program's reach by examining data on free and low-cost meal provision.

Strengths

• Data is provided by the authoritative Department of Agriculture.
• Dataset is updated regularly, with a recent update in April 2025.
• Released under a CC0 license, allowing for unrestricted public use.

Limitations

• Specific data structure is unknown, as column names and row counts are not provided.
• Data is only available in the legacy XLS format, which may require conversion for modern analysis.
• Sample data is unavailable, making initial assessment of data quality and fields difficult.

Provenance

Source

Department of Agriculture

Collection Method

Federally assisted program administrative data.

Freshness

Last updated on 2025-04-21.

Geography

National, with state-level detail implied by tags.