Students in Houston will be able to eat meals at school for free during the 2017-2018 school year.

Whether that free food is a response to the powerful storm Harvey, however, has become a source of confusion.

The Houston Independent School District, a public school system that serves around 215,000 students, said this week it had received approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Texas Department of Agriculture to waive an application process needed to obtain free breakfast and lunch in the wake of the storm.

The school district said the move meant all its students "will eat all school meals for free during the 2017-2018 school year."

“The flooding that is affecting the city of Houston has been devastating to so many. Some of the areas that are the hardest hit are filled with working parents whose limited funds will need to go toward recovery efforts,” Richard Carranza, the school district's superintendent, said in a statement. “This waiver will give our families one less concern as they begin the process of restoring their lives. It will also provide a sense of normalcy by allowing students to have access to up to three nutritious meals each and every school day.”

Last week, according to the school district, the Texas Department of Agriculture approved its application to offer free supper to all students.

However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service – which deals with waiver requests regarding the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program – says it granted permission for free meals for disaster-affected students only through September.

A release from the service Thursday lists steps taken in Texas by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including "allowing all disaster affected schools to provide meals to all students at no charge and be reimbursed at the free reimbursement rate through September 30."

School district officials did not immediately return a request for comment about the apparent disparity. But Mark Loeffler, communications director for the Texas Department of Agriculture, says the district "already had the ability to provide free meals for the rest of the school year" prior to Harvey and through a separate initiative.

"It’s a very complicated program,” Loeffler says. “Essentially what Houston Independent Schools did in announcing that is they rolled together several different programs, including the waiver from USDA and Texas Department of Agriculture, into the end result being they may be able to serve those three meals to all students.”

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“What our waiver did was to change a lot of how they could deliver the meals, how often they could deliver the meals, where they could deliver the meals," he adds.

A further clarification posted online by the Texas Department of Agriculture states that the school district "has not received any additional special waiver to serve free meals to their students for the entire year." It notes that ahead of Harvey, the 287-school system received approval for a reimbursable breakfast-and-lunch program at 191 sites, as well as for a supper program "available to all qualified school sites."

"Please note that the ... approvals for these programs were not related to the timeline before or after Hurricane Harvey," the department said.

The school district in its release said the latest waiver will take effect immediately. Monday was slated to be the first day of school for Houston's public school system, but the district canceled classes initially until Sept. 5. On Thursday, officials said school would resume Sept. 11.

“It will take months, possibly years for the city to recover,” Betti Wiggins, the district's nutrition services officer, said in a statement. “We expect families to be displaced, students to attend new schools, and many of them possibly using alternative ways to travel to and from school.”