Free Lunch

If you need a yardstick by which to measure your effectiveness as a parent, a fair place to start would be to ask yourself if your kids go hungry on snow days.

TAKOMA PARK, Md. — As back-to-back snowstorms shuttered schools for the week across the mid-Atlantic states, parents fretted about lost learning time, administrators scheduled makeup days and teachers posted assignments online.

But Marla Caplon worried about a more fundamental problem: How would students eat?

The two snowstorms that pummeled the region, leaving more than 3 feet of snow in some areas, deprived tens of thousands of children from Virginia to Pennsylvania of the free or reduced-price school lunch that may be their only nutritious meal of the day.