Dun the parents
Don’t punish kids for unpaid school lunch bills
Canon-McMillan School District has become the latest school system to make national headlines because of a policy on parents with overdue lunch bills. The problem with such policies is, the kids can get stuck in the middle. A child’s humiliation should not be the collateral damage in disputes between adults.
A cafeteria worker said she quit her job this month at Canon-McMillan after she was forced to take a hot lunch away from an elementary student whose parents had an unpaid meal bill of $25 or more. In keeping with district policy, she said, she gave him a cheese sandwich to eat instead. Last week, district superintendent Michael Daniels gave his own account, saying the child was a given a cold lunch initially and then provided with a hot lunch when a cashier realized his account was current after all.
Schools in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Albuquerque, N.M., have made news for similar policies in recent years. In each case, school districts were wrestling with large numbers of overdue bills and needed a way to bring parents in line. Other school districts also will have to make decisions about how to handle delinquent accounts; the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees school lunch programs, wants all states or school districts to have policies enacted by next summer. Many schools struggle to make ends meet and should not have to subsidize meals for parents who can afford to pay for them. But a school shouldn’t discontinue lunches in the way the phone company cuts off service to slow-paying customers. The USDA allows states and districts significant latitude in designing their policies, and this is where the stories emanating from Salt Lake City, Albuquerque and Canon-McMillan are instructive. Rather than taking a hot lunch from a child, the district should hire a debt collector, who could probably get most to pay in short order.
The state Department of Education — part of Gov. Tom Wolf’s new multiagency fight against hunger — should advise districts not to take hot meals from children. Children should not go hungry or be shamed because of their parents’ debts.