Losing Money One Free Cheese Sandwich At A Time

I was going to just make a sarcastic statement that the way for the Hillsborough County Public Schools to deal with the problem of students and parents cheating the free/reduced lunch system would be to just give free meals to all. Isn't that the politically correct way? Don't want to embarrass one group, so reduce the goal to the lowest common denominator and simply socialize the action, be it food or GPA's or "fun Friday's".

I decided to look at the stats and see if I could find some tricky schemes.

I would assume that HCPS has some pretty smart statisticians. That assumption makes me wonder if I am interpreting the stats the same way they do.

Let's take this part of the article:



Too many free lunches for those who can pay? | WFTS-TV:


"But 289 families, or 52%, of the applicants failed to respond to the audit and were dropped from the program."

For Hillsborough County it was 59.1% year 2007-2008 and 53.5% for 2008-2009 did not respond. According to the article, these students were dropped from the program. Sounds like a significant cost cutting event until you study the complete picture.

This 59.1% and 53.5% is only applicable to the 3% sample of the verified set.

Someone else can complete the math, but if the District can cut over 50% of 3%, how much money would they save if they cut over 50% of 100% of the free/reduced lunch kids?

Maybe it costs too much to survey? In other words, is the cost to verify more than the savings?

Or maybe "they" just don't want to challenge the status quo?

Just askin'