Nov. 11—The Marion County School District, in Ocala, Fla., spends nearly $22 million annually to serve lunch and breakfast to many of the district's 42,000 school children.
It's an enormous budget that's mostly funded by the federal government: Lunch under the National School Lunch Act of 1946, and breakfast under the Child Nutrition Act, created in 1966.
In all, the district serves 16,000 breakfasts and 29,000 lunches on each of the 180 school days. That's 2.9 million breakfasts and 5.2 million lunches annually.