Meal Benefit Expiration

Students who were approved for free or reduced lunch in a previous school year are allowed a grace period at the beginning of the next year.  They are allowed to continue to receive benefits based on last year’s applications for a period of time (usually 30 days) after the new school year begins.

Meal Benefit Expiration (MBE) is used to set up expiration dates for the carry-over statuses for students who do not submit a new lunch application for the new school year.  

• On the expiration date that you specify, all of last year’s status 2 and 3 students that have not been submitted new applications will become status 4 (paid).

• You can set up multiple expiration dates if you have school calendars with different starting dates (for example, Year Round and Traditional). You only need one MBE date for each starting date in your school calendars.

• ClickClearto clear the screen to set up a new MBE date.

UPPER GRID

This grid displays the created MBE dates.

• Highlight a row in the upper grid to select it for editing purposes.

  • UNDEFINED means that an expiration date has not been set for that site. Generally, all sites should be associated with an MBE date

MIDDLE SECTION

• Enter a description (Examples: Traditional, Year Round) in the Description text field.

• Select the expiration date from the Expiration Date text field.  It must be a future date.

  • Once the date has passed, it cannot be modified.

• Select the number of days for the period of the New Application Grace Period, which applies to students eating off of last year’s status (2 or 3) with the submission of a new application this year that results in an adverse change BEFORE the MBE date chosen.

• Select the number of days for the grace period for the Modified ApplicationGrace Period for adverse changes with new applications and for modifications to existing applications AFTER the MBE date chosen.

  • This was set to 10-days for the future examples (i.e. Verification Results Input) in this document, per the USDA standard.
  • Beneficial changes are immediate. The grace period only applies to adverse changes.
  • Setting the grace period to 0 will result in the status change happening the next morning. Therefore, you may wish to process your applications accordingly.

• Select the number of days for the grace period for the Student Transfer from CEP or Prov. 2 Site Grace Period for adverse changes for students transferring from a CEP or Provision 2 site to allow parents/guardians time to submit an application.
  • This was set to 10-days as a default.
  • This is helpful for situations when a student has never had to submit an application before.

LOWER GRID

• Check the Site Groups or Sites that expire on that date from the lower grid.

  • On Site Groups view, a check means all sites use this date; a square in the checkbox means some but not all sites in the group are assigned to the date.
  • On Sites view, the assigned sites are checked and positioned at top; other sites are unchecked and listed at the bottom.

   

 How it works

On the first login to POS, Student Eligibility or Accountability that occurs on or after the expiration date:

• Students with expired statuses will automatically be set to status 4.

• No further grace period is allowed and no letters are generated.

After the expiration date, any status changes must be done from Student Eligibility.

• No status changes will be allowed from POS Account Setup, Imports, or from the Status Change Utility.

For Transfers and Re-enroll of status 5 students from Import:

• It checks the MBE date for the site the student is transferring or re-enrolling into.

• If the MBE date has passed for that site, it sets the status to 4 if there is no application on file.

Meal Benefit Expiration Report

This report located under Reports will give a list of students who either had their status changed because of MBE  or are expected to have their status change when their MBE is run.

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www.mealsplus.com

Student Eligibility, revised 7/2018