Under the banner “Controversy,” Yahoo Parenting printed the following article: “High School Calls Out Kids With Lunch Debt, Serves Them Cheese Sandwiches,” by Melissa Walker on January 7, 2016. The article is at https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/high-school-calls-out-kids-with-lunch-balances-203559666.html Here is how it starts.
High school senior Sierra Feitl was in the lunch line on Monday when the girl in front of her was told to return her tray of food. “They were like, ‘You owe $25.60; I have to take the tray from you,’” Feitl told NBC affiliate WTHR. That day, all students who had hit a $25 debt limit with their lunch balances were given an “alternate lunch” of a cheese or peanut butter sandwich and milk.
The Kokomo school district in Indiana sent parents letters at the end of last year to alert them to the new debt policy, which went into effect on Jan. 1. It reads: “Once the $25.00 charge limit has been reached, an alternate meal will be provided to the student. The parent and/or guardian of the student will receive an automated phone call and/or email explaining that the student has reached his/her charge limit.”
Jeff Hauswald, superintendent of Kokomo School Corporation, told WTHR that the rule follows federal regulations and aligns with other surrounding districts. Last year, the district had to foot the bill for more than $50,000 worth of unpaid school meals.
Finances aside, Feitl objected to the way the students were treated, and she snapped a photo of the cheese sandwich to post to Facebook with this message: “If you owe $25 or more on your lunch account, this is what Kokomo High School provides you for lunch. Two slices of bread and two slices of cheese. Absolutely mortifying. My heart goes out to the kids that I go to school with that get their only meal a day at school.” Her post has been shared nearly 800 times, and there is a heated discussion in the comments.
Eduhonesty: I like Sierrra Feitl. She perceived an injustice and she went into battle. But she’s wrong. For one thing, the kids with free and reduced-priced lunches were not the target of these cheese sandwiches. This policy was for regular, paying customers according to a later part of the article, for those parents who did not qualify for free lunches. The government will pay for lunch if you are truly poor. While I have not been able to confirm this fact, my understanding is that, according to a school spokesman, only 10% of the kids with lunch account deficits qualify for any assistance.
That $50,000 the district paid for unpaid meals last year? That money was taken away from other alternatives. That was $50,000 that did not go to purchase new computers or books, an extra teaching assistant, or new musical instruments. That money that parents owed and did not pay took away $50,000 from this year’s students. My cafeteria in past years has taken the same approach, given those same cheese or peanut butter sandwiches to kids. What else can you do when the parents don’t pay what they owe? The kids can exert pressure to get the lunch money to come in. Without that pressure, a school district ends up saddled with a debt that takes money away from future student needs.
Yahoo should never have generated this controversy, or should have provided more information when they let Sierra’s cheese sandwich pictures loose on such a huge source of internet information. I imagine the kids are avidly following this story about their own district and the comments now contain many versions of “life is hard when your parent is a dead beat.” Negative comments relating to parent irresponsibility abound. If the kids felt bad before, I suspect they feel worse now.
If they are embarrassed, though, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. We should be teaching lessons beyond the core curriculum. The lesson here is that if you don’t pay your bills, that behavior will come back to bite you — a highly useful lesson that should be learned before cars are repossessed and young adults get ready to sign on the bottom lines of those many mortgage documents.