“Easy to be abused” doesn’t touch it. It is DESIGNED to be abused.
I first ran into this in the 80s. Had two kids in a fairly prosperous rural district. Start of the year, I had completed a survey, turns out I qualified (barely) at 200% of poverty for reduced price lunches. Thanks, but no thanks says I. One kid packed his own lunch, the girl, I could afford.
The district stayed on my case to accept for both kids, finally stirred my interest to look into it. Turns out, free/reduced price lunch is a “linch-pin” program. All sorts of other federal grants use the percentage of lunch/breakfast enrollees as a district’s qualifying standard for everything from special ed to God-knows-what. The district honchos didn’t give a rat’s if my kids actually ate the cafeteria garbage or catered Beluga caviar, the district wanted those stats as “poverty” cases.
Exactly - My mom worked in the schools for years, it all came down to revenue in the end.