LOS ANGELES – School officials in Los Angeles announced this week they are expanding a program to provide dinner to students enrolled in after school programs, the latest effort in a growing nationwide trend.

District officials announced Thursday they plan to double the number of students served dinner in school, with the hope of eventually providing the meals to students in all of the district’s schools, the Associated Press reports.

The move is motivated by a pilot program embedded in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, an overhaul of school food programs run through the National School Lunch Program that also imposed restrictions on calories, fat, sugar, sodium and other nutritional elements. First lady Michelle Obama has led the charge to force the changes to school lunches, which have been wildly unpopular, led to record lunch revenue losses, convinced more than 1 million students to quit eating school lunch, and resulted in more than $1 billion in food waste.

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Regardless, 13 states and the District of Columbia are participating in a pilot program in which “schools where at least half the students are low-income and qualify for free or reduced-price lunch are reimbursed for each supper by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, at a rate often significantly higher than the cost of the meal,” the AP reports.

“In the 2014 fiscal year, 104 million suppers were served to students, up from about 19 million in 2009.”

“When kids are hungry, they don’t pay attention,” L.A. school board member Bennett Kayser said in announcing the district’s dinner expansion this week. “This is something that should have started years ago.”

Proponents of the free federal school dinners contend that the meals may be the only dinner some students receive.

Evelyn Ruballos, a 10-year-old at Kingsley Elementary School in L.A., told the AP her typical dinner consists of crackers, “and then I just go to sleep,” she said.

Critics of the plan contend the move robs families of important dinner time together. Studies have found students that eat dinner with their families get better grades, have better attendance and enjoy better family relations, according to the AP.

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“Yet the research also presents a chicken-and-egg type question: Do children reap those benefits because they have dinner with their families, or do the same families that have dinner together display other traits that account for higher achievement?” the news service reports.

The Los Angeles school district currently serves dinner to 75,000 students, but hopes to double that in the next two years, which school officials believe will bring in $16.6 million from the government to expand the program.

Other large urban districts are also fully on board with the school dinners.

In Philadelphia, 4,500 dinners are served to students each day, Wayne Grasela, VP of food services, told the AP.