Between 1969 and 1975, the number of schools participating in the National School Lunch Program rose from less than 75,000 to nearly 90,000 and the number of participating students more than doubled.  With more funding allocated than ever before and nearly 25 million children getting lunch at school every day, it appeared that the White House Conference’s recommendations had achieved their goals of expanding access for hungry children. But as historian Susan Levine argues, Nixon’s reforms also, in effect, turned the NSLP into “a free lunch program for the poor,” weakening popular support for the program as a result. In the same years as access to free and reduced-price lunch expanded, students who had been paying for their lunches dropped out of the program in droves: between 1970 and 1973, Levine estimates, at least 1 million children stopped buying their lunch from the school cafeteria. This created a vicious cycle: as the proportion of the participating students receiving free and reduced-price meals rose, the NSLP became increasingly associated with poor children and, particularly, poor children of color. The social stigma toward those participating students increased, prompting ever-more paying students to drop out. Since some 90% of schools relied on student fees to fund their lunch programs, those dropouts could be catastrophic to the program. Although reforms initiated during the Nixon administration expanded access to free meals, by transforming school lunch into an anti-poverty program, they also unleashed a racist backlash that destabilized the finances of the program in the long-run.