Fewer Hawai'i public school students are eating school lunch and the number of students on free or reduced lunch has also decreased, according to figures from the state Department of Education.

Of Hawai'i's 173,000 public school children, about 102,243 students participated in the federal school lunch program in the 2006-2007 school year, the DOE reported. That's a 6.6 percent decrease from 109,485 in 2005-2006.

Similarly, participation in the federal free and reduced lunch program has also decreased. In the 2006-2007 school year, 68,850 public school students were approved for free or reduced lunch, a 4.5 percent decrease from the previous year.

"We are one of few states where participation keeps decreasing," said Randy Moore, assistant superintendent of business services for the DOE.

"I'm not totally sure why, but it is something of concern to us," Moore said.

Education officials attribute the decline in free or reduced lunch participation to a number of factors, one being an improved economy.

"If you look at the economy, we have a low unemployment rate. Parents that qualified two or three years ago because of low income now have jobs. They are now working so they don't qualify," said Glenna Owens, director of the DOE's School Food Services Branch.

About three years ago, the DOE also centralized the processing of free or reduced school lunch applications, taking the job away from individual schools.

"Since that has been centralized, those numbers have gone down, because applications are now highly scrutinized." Owens said.

Education officials, however, say it is much more difficult to explain why total participation is on the decrease.

Enrollment has only decreased by about 1.25 percent from 2006 to 2007, which doesn't fully explain the steep decrease in lunch participation, education officials said.

NEW ELECTRONIC SYSTEM

One possible explanation is that over the past several years, the DOE has implemented an electronic system for lunch service. That system allows for better counting and more accurate reporting of school lunch participation on the school level, DOE officials say.

"Before it was a manual system and the room for error was greater," Owens said. "The standards for meal counting and claiming are more rigid now."

Owens also pointed out that high school students tend to eat school lunch at a lower rate than elementary or middle schoolers.

"At 16, you're able to say, 'I'm going to skip lunch and I'm going to head to McDonald's once school lets out,'" Owens said.

"On the elementary level, they're a captive audience," she said.

Some elementary schools have implemented their own policies to increase school lunch participation, Moore said. Some require students to have a note from a parent if they are not going to be eating in the cafeteria.

Those types of policies are more difficult to implement on the high school level, Moore said.

"Certainly the mission of the federal program is that every student has a healthy breakfast and lunch. The research says if you get three square meals a day, you'll do better in school. So it is definitely in our interest to increase that participation rate," Moore said.

Reach Loren Moreno at lmoreno@honoluluadvertiser.com.