Dripping Life May 16

Students who are behind in paying for school lunches in Warwick, Rhode Island ISD, are being served cold sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwiches. Legislation requiring all students to receive the same hot lunch in Rhode Island, regardless of their family’s financial circumstances is pending.

Warwick school officials defended the move, saying the district is owed “tens of thousands of dollars” in lunch money, while also dealing with soaring funding shortfalls.

In a neighboring Rhode Island city – Cranston –a collection agency was hired to track down families with outstanding school lunch debt.

Across the country, school districts have chosen to punish students who owe money for lunches by serving the young debtors unappetizing cheese and dry bread sandwiches, stamping the students’ arms with an obvious, “I NEED LUNCH MONEY” or having lunchroom workers pick up the lunches served to unpaid students and throwing them away.  

Some schools require students behind in paying for lunches clean tables in front of their peers. When a Pennsylvania lunch room worker was directed to withhold a child’s hot lunch, and she said she could not refuse to feed a hungry student, she quit in protest of the policy. In Colorado, a cafeteria worker was fired for giving extra food to hungry elementary students.

The states of Virginia, California and New Mexico have banned “lunch shaming,” saying it unfairly stigmatizes students living in poverty. New Mexico was the first state to pass the ban.

Killeen, Texas ISD teaching assistant Kelvin Holt watched as a preschooler fell to the back of a cafeteria line during breakfast, as if trying to hide. “The cash register woman says to this 4-year-old girl, verbatim, ‘You have no money,'” Holt said, describing an incident in 2016. The child’s carton of milk was removed from the tray and her food was dumped in the trash. The four-year-old walked away in tears.”

The U.S. Agriculture Department, as of 2017, began requiring districts to adopt policies for addressing meal debts and to inform parents at the start of the academic year. Further, the Agriculture Department’s National School Lunch Program shields the nation’s poorest children from so-called lunch shaming, allowing kids to eat for free if a family of four earns less than about $32,000 a year or at a discount if earnings are under $45,000. 

Households with slightly higher incomes are more likely to struggle, experts on poverty and nutrition say. It’s also about families, likely to qualify for the National School Lunch Program, who may be fearful of submitting personal information required in free-lunch paperwork.

Three weeks into the 2018-2019 school year, Houston Independent School District began serving three free meals a day to all students.  Low-income families no longer complete the free and reduced food application, but all parents submit information used to determine how much HISD is reimbursed.  About 87 percent of HISD students had already qualified for this federal program last year, classifying Houston as a high-poverty area.

Longview (TX) among other ISDs will begin providing free breakfast, lunch and a late-afternoon snack in Fall 2019.

Many school administrators, teachers and lawmaker say school meals should be offered free to all children, regardless of income, as is the case in Sweden and Brazil.

One retired teacher in Florida remembered the dietary staff taking debt notices to class. “The cafeteria staff would come in, wearing their hairnets, and hand out letters. All the kids would turn around to see who was getting one.”

One mother said she’s witnessed the lasting effects of lunch shaming. Her adult son refuses to eat peanut butter because it reminds him of public school when students with debt were sent to a table to make peanut butter sandwiches. “The humiliation has persisted for 20 years,” she said. “It shows how lasting these traumatic shaming experiences can be.”

“We need to provide school meals on the same basis on which we provide school transportation and textbooks,” said Janet Poppendieck, a senior fellow at the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute and author of “Free for All: Fixing School Food in America.”

Do you know how your school handles late lunch payments?