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The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) administers the Child Nutrition (CN) Programs, including the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), School Milk Program (SMP), School Breakfast Program (SBP), Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), and Summer Food Service Program (SFSP). FNS provides oversight, guidance, and technical assistance to the State Agencies administering CN Programs at the State level. State Agencies are responsible for ensuring that School Food Authorities (SFAs) comply with all program regulations by performing administrative reviews and procurement reviews and SFAs are responsible for the procurement of foods, goods, and services for their school meals and for feeding children. SFAs can encompass a single school, multiple schools, an entire school district, or multiple school districts. "The Study of School Food Authority (SFA) Procurement Practices" is the first study from the FNS to comprehensively describe and assess the decision-making process regarding school food procurement practices at the SFA level. The research objectives were to: (1) Describe how SFAs develop and publish solicitations, evaluate and award contracts, and monitor contractor performance for all school food purchases; (2) Describe procedures and recordkeeping practices used by SFAs with their food service management company (FSMC) contracts; (3) Describe the forms of group purchasing efforts used to purchase goods and services; (4) Assess the availability of State agency-provided technical assistance and training resources; and (5) Assess the strengths and weaknesses of SFAs to develop solicitation and contract documents, evaluate bids/responses, negotiate terms and conditions, and conduct contract oversight. The study addressed the research objectives by collecting information from SFAs with a web-based survey, followed by interviews to a subset of SFAs. The mixed-methods design, in which both quantitative and qualitative information were collected and analyzed, provided a comprehensive examination of the SFA procurement practices. The sample was a subset of the 1,679 SFAs that participated in the Child Nutrition Program Operations Study II (CN-OPS-II), which included a module on SFA procurement practices in school year (SY) 2016-17. Findings are based on the perceptions and experiences of the SFA and they may not reflect actual regulations and policies. [This report was prepared by 2M Research.]

We study the spectrum of Laplace operators on a one-parameter family of gravitational instantons of bi-axial Bianchi IX type coupled to an abelian connection with self-dual curvature. The family of geometries includes the Taub-NUT, Taub-bolt and Euclidean Schwarzschild geometries and interpolates between them. The interpolating geometries have conical singularities along a submanifold of co-dimension two, but we prove that the associated Laplace operators have natural self-adjoint extensions and study their spectra. In particular, we determine the essential spectrum and prove that its complement, the discrete spectrum, is infinite. We compute these eigenvalues numerically and compare the numerical results with an analytical approximation derived from the asymptotic Taub-NUT form of each of the geometries in our family., Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures and 3 tables; minor corrections throughout the text