There’s no such thing as a free lunch, unless you are a student in Oak Ridge Schools. All students will be offered school breakfast and lunch at no cost to the student or family beginning with the 2025-06 school year.

All Oak Ridge Schools will participate in the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) this year, offering meals at no cost to all Oak Ridge Schools students for the first time aside from the years when Covid made the program universally available.

In January 2025, the district announced that five of its eight schools would participate, but this is the first year that all schools will participate in the program.

CEP is a key provision of the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010, which allows schools and school districts in low-income areas to eliminate school meal applications and serve breakfast and lunch at no charge to all enrolled students. By offering all students a nutritious breakfast and lunch at no cost, CEP helps ensure more students come to class well-nourished and ready to learn.

“While there is a cost to the district to roll this out to all schools, it aligns with our core value of putting our students first and investing in their well-being whenever possible,” said Dr. Bruce Borchers, superintendent of Oak Ridge Schools. “While the federal landscape is changing, and the long-term cost and eligibility to continue this program in future years is subject to change, we will continue to offer this to our schools for as long as we are able to financially support it.”

Breakfast and lunch meals will follow the U. S. Department of Agriculture guidelines for healthy school meals. In the operation of child feeding programs, no child will be discriminated against.

Parents or guardians who need further information may contact Marcia Wade, school nutrition supervisor, at mkwade@ortn.edu or 865-425-9028.

Molly Gallagher Smith of Oak Ridge Schools provided information and quotes.

Who earns more: An ICE agent or a school teacher?

Internet reports that new ICE agents are getting six figure salaries, far exceeding pay for teachers. Snopes checked and concluded the claim is “mixed” – some truth, some not.

In a story by Rae Deng published July 22, 2025:

Claim: In 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offered new employees a $100,000 salary on top of a $45,000 signing bonus, far more than what teachers in the United States make.

What’s True

In July 2025, ICE offered the agency’s former employees a five-figure sign-on bonus and a potential salary of around $100,000 to return to immigration enforcement. This offer from the agency exceeded the average salary of a teacher in the United States. ICE salary schedule and job requirements.

What’s False

More exactly, the agency offered up to $50,000, not $45,000, as a sign-on bonus, and the salary for an ICE officer in this position ranged from $88,621 to $144,031 as of this writing. The full offered bonus is only available until Aug. 1, 2025, and only to former employees. Salaries for experienced teachers – as a more direct comparison to experienced ICE agents returning to work – were about on par with the pay offered to ICE’s former employees.

What’s Undetermined

ICE did not immediately return an inquiry as to whether new agents would receive sign-on bonuses and whether those bonuses would match the $45,000 number circulating online.

KnoxTNToday checked the salary schedules for local school systems: Oak Ridge Schools, Knox County Schools. Note: salaries are based on “step increases” and educational attainment hence the complexity of the schedules. It is a long way to $100,000 by any metric.

Notes & Quotes

HR 1 (aka the one big beautiful bill) has about 1,100 pages that few have read including the legislators who voted on it. Find it here. We tried to find portions that relate to education. The Act lacks an index, so you can’t find Pell grants, for instance. But here’s what we learned:

Student loans: Per PBS News Hour, nearly half a million borrowers could see their payments spike after the Department of Education scrapped most existing repayment plans. Problem is, Trump is also scrapping the Department of Education so this is a puzzlement.

The bill also imposes new lifetime borrowing caps:

  • $100,000 for graduate students
  • $200,000 for those pursuing professional degrees like law or medicine
  • $65,000 per child for parent borrowers.

The Trump administration has unfrozen over a billion dollars for critical after-school and summer education programming, a senior administration official told ABC News. Congress appropriated $1.329 billion for the programs this fiscal year, which Trump had attempted to impound by executive order. Story here.