The percentage of students eligible for free or reduced lunch is the best-available proxy for percentage of students who are low-income in public schools. So this story about the district of Akron, Ohio, offering free lunch to all of its students is especially interesting. 

Akron’s middle and high school students won’t have to pay for school lunches this fall or even fill out paperwork for a government subsidy.

The district already provides free breakfast in all its schools and free lunch in its elementary buildings.

The Akron school board voted this week to extend that policy to all Akron schools under a new option for districts that participate in the national school lunch program.

The change won’t cost local taxpayers any money and the district is expected to save some money because officials won’t have to print, collect and process applications for free and reduced-price lunches.

If this becomes a trend, that's quite the boon for students, but will make the already imperfect art of estimating the percentage of low-income students in a district a bigger pain. You could use eligibility for other federal aid programs, I guess, but I wonder how much of that information districts already collect (or if they should be in the business of collecting any at all).