Did the school still bill government full price for the free lunches?
Exactly, this is a form of union work slowdown in a mission critical function of the public school system, this is just not billing fraud, it's probably illegal under Taft-Hartley and the federal School Lunch and Breakfast Program.
The school lunch lobby: a charmed federal food program that no longer just feeds the hungry. Douglas Besharov, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has been the most outspoken critic of the traditional thinking that surrounds school food programs. "We're still feeding the poor as if they're starving," he says, alluding to the original intent of the school lunch programs. In testimony before Congress in 2003 and in a long article in the Washington Post in 2002, Besharov argued that school meals give children too many calories. Worse, they do so even if they follow the new program guidelines. Specifically, federal rules require a school lunch to provide 33 percent of the recommended daily allowance of calories; a school breakfast should provide 25 percent. That leaves only 42 percent of the recommended number of calories to be consumed outside of school, more than covered by one "supersized" hamburger and a soda.