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Can We Stop Kids From Being Shamed Over School Lunch Debt? [1]
['Nadra Nittle', 'Anthony Nicome', 'Cassie M. Chew', 'Jake Price', 'Grey Moran', 'Lynn Fantom', 'Naoki Nitta', 'Kate Nelson', 'Peter Lehner', 'Jennifer Oldham']
Date: 2019-05-21
An Alabama elementary school stamps a child’s arm with the message: “I need lunch money.” A Minnesota school district warns graduating seniors that they will not receive caps and gowns unless their meal debt is paid. A New Hampshire cafeteria worker is fired for serving students with outstanding lunch bills.
These are all examples of lunch shaming, a practice that may vary depending on the context, but which has persisted for years. Outcry about the issue has grown louder since the Great Recession, when a number of school districts found themselves in a financial crunch and began using punitive measures to settle meal debt.
“States have described a point in which school lunch programs needed to start standing independently as a ‘business unit,’” said Jessica Webster, staff attorney of the Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid Legal Services Advocacy Project. “They couldn’t run in the red anymore because districts could no longer cover the debt. So, we saw a surge in a la carte foods and competitive foods like pop, candy, and Taco Bell to cover those debts. But when parents started asking for bans on these competitive, unhealthy foods, school lunch programs could no longer cover the shortfalls.”
The result has been lunch programs across the country making headlines with a variety of lunch shaming practices, which in turn has led to a movement largely focused on fundraising and legislation as remedies. While many Americans remain unaware of this problem, when stories of lunch shaming hit the headlines or go viral, people have begun to spring into action.
For example, when Warwick Schools in Rhode Island announced earlier this month that children with delinquent lunch tabs would be served cold sun butter and jelly sandwiches (with veggies, fruit, and milk) instead of hot menu items, it sparked a fierce backlash. In just one week, the public raised the $77,000 needed to wipe out the lunch debt Warwick had accrued. To date, two GoFundMe campaigns and Chobani Yogurt CEO Hamdi Ulukaya have raised more than $150,000 to clear Warwick’s student lunch debt and then some, but this development by no means provides a meaningful solution to the student lunch debt that’s ballooning across the country.
Some states are seeing school lunch debt soar into the millions of dollars, but the exact amount of lunch debt schools nationwide have accumulated collectively isn’t known because the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t collect or provide that data. As an issue that disproportionately involves marginalized families—those in poverty, living paycheck to paycheck, or even undocumented immigrants afraid to participate in the federal free lunch program—lunch debt magnifies the widespread economic and structural inequities that have historically existed in the U.S. It also has a very real effect on children—whether causing them go hungry (since school meals are the only meals some children eat in a day), hurting their self-esteem, or both.
The acts of shaming that accompany lunch debt may be hard for children to shake, according to Bettina Elias Siegel, a Civil Eats contributor and author of the forthcoming book, “Kid Food: The Challenge of Feeding Children in a Highly Processed World.”
“Children are so aware of differences between kids—whether it’s socioeconomic, popularity, or whatever—that when you engage in any practice expressly meant to set them apart, kids feel that keenly,” Siegel said. “The stigma is real; it’s a really unfortunate tactic.”
She added that lunch shaming also exacerbates existing socioeconomic differences in school cafeterias in which more privileged students can buy a la carte items while their less privileged peers eat standard lunches.
Various states and school districts have taken measures in recent years to do away with lunch-shaming policies that saw youth with past-due lunch accounts relegated to eating cold snacks or nothing at all. In some cases, students performed cafeteria chores to work off their debts or had to wear stickers or hand stamps that called out their past-due account status. As state legislation and other protections have been put into place to avoid shaming students, lunch debt continues to grow, and schools may still take punitive measures against families to resolve these bills—from sending debt collectors after them to threatening to stop students from graduating.
Student lunch debt carries consequences that may extend well beyond a child’s K-12 education. To adequately address this issue, student advocacy and anti-poverty groups say schools must improve how they communicate with parents, families need to be better educated about children’s options for lunch, and Congress may need to pass federal legislation. Donations to erase lunch debt, however, remain a quick fix to a complex and ongoing problem.
“I wish we could channel all that fundraising into a broader effort to advocate at the national level for [universal] free lunch.” Siegel said. “We supply books for children. We provide buses to get them to school. By the same token, we should be supplying kids a free lunch.”
Lunch Debt Is Growing, But Donations Aren’t a Solution
In 2017, Denver Public Schools made a widely applauded announcement: It would no longer deny hot meals to students with negative meal balances. But its goal to make sure that none of the 92,000 children in the district was left eating a cheese sandwich or graham crackers and milk—its previous policy for students with unpaid lunch bills—faced an unexpected drawback. School lunch debt in Denver shot up from $13,000 during the 2016-17 school year to $356,000 the next.
After the passage of a 2017 anti-lunch shaming bill that requires cafeteria staff to feed all students, Oregon schools have experienced a similarly exponential growth in lunch debt. The law also prevents school workers from asking children to pay for food. By the end of 2018, more than three dozen districts in the state had racked up $1.3 million in unpaid balances.
Rising lunch debt isn’t unique to Oregon or Denver, however. According to the School Nutrition Association, a nonprofit that represents student meal providers, school lunch debt is widespread across the country. Its 2018 School Nutrition Operations Report found that 75.3 percent of school districts had unpaid meal debt at the end of the 2016-17 school year, up 4 percentage points from four years earlier.
The rise has occurred during a period in which states including New York, Iowa, New Mexico, California, Minnesota, and Texas have enacted legislation to crack down on lunch shaming, and do-gooders have collected money to help school districts clear student lunch debt. A fundraising campaign and a private donation wiped out Denver Public Schools’ $13,000 lunch debt from the 2016-17 school year. More recently, community members in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan rallied to cover students’ unpaid lunch bills during the 2018 holiday season.
And just in time for 2019’s commencement ceremonies, the Philando Castile Relief Foundation made an $8,000 donation to erase the lunch debt of students at Robbinsdale Cooper High School in suburban Minneapolis. Castile, a Black man whose 2016 killing by police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, sparked nationwide protests, was a cafeteria supervisor at a Minnesota Montessori school. He routinely paid for lunch for students with overdrawn meal accounts, and the foundation named after him continues that legacy.
Students are also on a mission to solve the problem of lunch debt in schools. Last December, an Orlando, Florida, fifth-grader donated $100 of his earnings to pay for unpaid lunch bills at his elementary school. In 2017, Palm Beach County high school student Christian Cordon-Cano started the nonprofit School Lunch Fairy to cover student meals all over the country. So far, he has raised more than $72,000 for that purpose. He told Civil Eats that he got the idea for his nonprofit after listening to a radio broadcast about lunch debt.
“I went to a private Christian school and lunch shaming had never crossed my mind,” said Cordon-Cano, now a college freshman. “I was so shocked that I thought I had to do something about lunch sharing. Every kid deserves a good lunch, so to me, to embarrass them, it’s very sad.”
The School Lunch Fairy website takes donations from members of the public who want to help schools get rid of lunch debt. But Cordon-Cano said that some schools have turned down his organization’s efforts to clear their meal debt.
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[1] Url:
https://civileats.com/2019/05/21/can-we-stop-kids-from-being-shamed-over-school-lunch-debt/
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