Withholding food from children to penalize them for the negligence of their parents still seems wrong.
In any case, the solution to all three of your scenarios - Parents don’t have the money, parents don’t provide the money, student doesn’t use the money for food - is the one you like anyway. And, it solves your problems with the debate too, by making it irrelevant. So, really, there is no reason to change your mind.
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I don’t. Do you have evidence in the other direction, that lunch debt programs disproportionately impact the poor? I mean, that’s sort of the lynchpin behind the whole thing. If there’s evidence that the majority of students penalized for lunch debt are under the line where they would qualify for free or subsidized school lunch, I’d unquestionably concede this point!
Anecdotally, my families with moderate incomes - both when I grew up and when I was raising my child - were relentlessly pursued to apply to the school lunch program. I knew plenty of poor kids when I was in school, and I knew not a one who went hungry - although, yes, there was a stigma behind having a free lunch card (who many had).
At some point, there is the question of whether lunch debt is a stigma for the poor kids or a “benefit” for affluent kids. I’ve never seen anything, either in personal life or in the news, which indicates the former. At some point we need to ask who these kids who are in debt are. If they’re poor, hell yeah, let’s buy 'em lunch. If they’re rich and pocketing lunch money, I’m not very sympathetic. I’ve only seen anecdotal evidence to the latter.
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Same thing happens in Italy. The food quality of food was not high, so some parents stopped to pay for school food and started to give a lunch box to their children.
A huge legal battle started where the schools were saying that the lunch is part of the educational offer. The matter arrived to the Supreme Court that ruled in favor of schools. So in most school the parents have to pay for getting no food, in other schools the children with the lunch box are segregated and have to eat in different rooms and other bureaucratic madness.
Almost all the food in schools isn’t made by people employed by the school or the municipality, but is outsourced to some food corporations and their personnel doesn’t nothing for the kids that aren’t eating their food.
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My hometown (about 30K people) figured out that since 70% of their students qualify for free meals (both breakfast and lunch) it’s cheaper to provide free meals for all of them than to deploy an accurate monitoring system to prove who was is the system and who isn’t. Meals are now free for all students.
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Kids are not responsible for their parents.
There are plenty of kids from families that look rich, but it’s all an illusion. Mom and Dad spend big on the visuals, but there’s nothing left over for feeding the kids. There may be other things going on. No kid should have to justify to a cafeteria worker, administrator or bureaucrat why they deserve to eat.
Means testing for school lunches is bullshit. No kid should have to prove they “deserve” to be fed, depending on what Mom and Dad make. Or on Mom and Dad’s feelings of shame or fear.
Every single child should be eligible for free lunch, no applications or means testing required. So what if the rich kid’s parents can afford it. I honestly do not care. The choice can remain to bring your own, but options on a free menu should be for all.
And there need to be options, to accommodate for allergies and dietary needs, including religious/philosophical dietary needs.
And not “reduced cost”. Free. And no, you will not change my mind on this.
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It turns out that @j9c has kindly provided us a link in their reply to this thread. It’s the link in the one-box entitled “Map the Meal Gap”
The tl;dr from that link is an estimate for Hennepin county, MN (the area in question) based on real data from 2015. Basically, about 30% of food insecure kids do not qualify for food assistance.
It’s far from a perfect overlap, but for the sake of discourse, can we assume that 30% of the kids affected by the lunch debt policy actually are hungry?
Strictly speaking, that would mean that your assertion that
is technically correct.
But for myself, I think a policy that gets it wrong 30% of the time needs fixing.
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a cultural belief that signing up is shameful
I personally would feel pretty ashamed if I couldn’t feed my kids. You might not look at me or judge me in that way, but that’s how I would feel.
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Ah, but then that sounds like you’re actually seeking viable solutions to a real problem, not just spoiling for an argument on the internet!
I must:
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I had free lunch throughout my public education and I graduated in 1994. The teacher had a list, called your name, you walked outside to the hall, grabbed a ticket or paid 10/25 cents for one, held on to the ticket until lunch time, got your food, and paid with the ticket. As a kid you just did what you were told but going into high school you could feel the eyes on you to the point it was better to starve than get made fun of. That’s my first hand experience.
Anyways throwing good hot food and serving cold food is awful low of waste.
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OK, fair points. What if I’m sympathetic to the 3.7% in genuine debt due to lack of resources without being eligible for the program, as may well be the case - let’s make that 5% to bring that over the line a little bit - and am deeply disgusted by the 95% who view the public school system as some sort of bank when they could simply pay for lunch or can’t keep their kids from pocketing lunch money? It’s still not OK.
What’s the proposed solution, when there seems to be this much bad faith from those who can afford it against a public resource?
Slipping into something a little more comfortable?
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- Kids whose parents don’t give them lunch money should get our sympathy not be punished.
- When the cheaters are kids pocketing their lunch money, the collateral damage of punishing those cheaters is too high. That being withholding food from honest, hungry kids.
- If we want to target fraud and abuse in our public systems, kids stealing a couple of bucks a day doesn’t have a great return on investment.
[edited for clarity]
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Graduated in 99, and our school was less Scarlet Lettery about it. Free lunch and paid lunch kids all got the same yellow meal ticket to be stamped by the cashier. Now at my kids’ elementary, they use a PIN system that holds the balance, and I assume those on the free lunch program just have it “deduct” that way without a way to tell the difference between that and paid lunch. Thinking back, I do wish the free lunch provided a “treat” a week so the kids could have a little something just once a week. But if we’re still shaming kids like this, that won’t happen anytime soon.
I can’t imagine the lunch ladies are all like Real Housewives of Wherever and living it up and can’t empathize with these kids.
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Nope. That assumes that poor parents both apply for and are deemed eligible for the program, despite the fact that the federal poverty definition being used is laughably low, widely acknowledged to be outdated garbage, and applications aren’t always processed correctly. So a whole lot of struggling famlies don’t qualify. Also school lunch fees these days are based on accounts directly paid into by parents - if that wasn’t the system in place, students couldn’t be racking up lunch debt in the first place. So this is absolutely about punishing kids for what their parents are (not) doing or able to do.
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What seems extra crazy about this is that the compensation of the cafeteria workers would not be tied in any way to whether or not the students are actually paying for them, so what would motivate them personally to do something like this is a bit mysterious. It’s not their money. And making the food and just throwing it away? Jeez.
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During my middle school struggles with a mildly abusive new stepmother, one of her favorite petty punishments was to refuse to allow me to either pack a lunch or give me lunch money. We were a fairly affluent family so everyone just assumed I was eating disordered or something since I often didn’t eat lunch.
Not all kids have good parents. Feed them anyway.
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I grew up late 60’s into early 70’s with only Mom and older sister 2 years ahead of me. We, sister and myself made our lunches in morning while we all got ready for the day. Mom had us regimented. Guess we were luckily. Mom is holder of the Order of Canada and in her 70’s now. Love you Mom.
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Not all Latinos/Latinas are immigrants.
Not all immigrants are Latinos/Latinas.
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