re: Our kid just received an unsolicited EBT card on the mail.

The feds. This has nothing to do with Louisiana other than the fact that the feds hand down the actual distribution to each state for obvious reasons. The department of child and family services (SNAP office) deal with getting the cards out and going through the data as to who gets one. The schools gave that data over, hence why schools who are on provisional programs where all kids are “free status” due to the overall population average are having high income families receive cards.

The reason so many high income people got cards is pure coincidence due to Ida. Ida damaged areas allowed swaths of the population to qualify for DSNAP (disaster food stamps) even if they make plenty of money. The more kids whose families are in SNAP, the higher the poverty percentage becomes for the schools they attend. Because of this, many Louisiana schools took advantage of their increased percentage and opted into provisional programs they don’t typically qualify for. Reason? It eliminates TONS of administrative burden (no more income applications families have to complete, no more dealing with hassling people to pay their lunch bills, etc). Once you’re accepted on the provisional program, you get it for 4 years.

So unless we have another disaster storm, many of these higher income area schools will go back to traditional free/reduced/full paid program in 4 years.

In the meantime, you get the same benefits the actual poor schools and poor students get purely because we had a major storm.