Unpaid meal debts soar after DPS ends lunch-shaming
After the Denver schools chief made a highprofile announcement last August guaranteeing a full meal to students whether or not they had the money to pay, many advocates cheered the end of socalled “lunchshaming” in the 92,000student district.
Then came an unpleasant surprise: Debt from unpaid lunches soared, rising to $356,000 from $13,000 the year before.
Denver’s exploding meal debt — amounting to roughly 900 unpaid lunches every school day of the year — illustrates the balancing act districts nationwide face amid growing public support for policies prohibiting lunchshaming. Such shaming often involves giving students who can’t pay small, alternative meals, putting stickers or stamps on them to remind their parents to pay, or even throwing out their meals.
In the last couple years, a growing number of districts nationwide have established policies to curb lunchshaming. Some states, including New York, Iowa and New Mexico, have passed statewide legislation with the same goals. The idea behind such measures is to free students from the burden of debt they have no power to pay and ensure they don’t go hungry at school. But with school districts obligated to pay for the meals, food service leaders are often left scrambling to cover mounting costs.
Nearly onethird of the district’s lunch debt last year came from families who were eligible for free or reducedprice meals, but signed up partway into the school year, after their children had already received free school lunches. The federal government covers lunch costs for students eligible for free lunches and part of the cost for students who qualify for reducedprice lunches. For elementary school students in Colorado (and starting next year for middleschoolers), the state covers the remaining cost of reducedprice lunches.
Another 68 percent of Denver families with unpaid meal debt don’t qualify for free or reducedprice meals. Still, district officials said it’s impossible to determine how many of those families would qualify for subsidized lunches if they applied, how many struggle financially but just miss the cutoff for eligibility, and how many can afford to pay for school lunches but choose not to.
Theresa Peña, regional coordinator for outreach and engagement in Denver’s nutrition services department, supports the district’s new lunchshaming prevention policy, which ended the practice of giving students with lunch debt cheese sandwiches or graham crackers and milk.
Still, district officials didn’t expect the ballooning lunch debt, which at one point was projected to hit a halfmillion dollars, she said.
Peña said the district is stepping up efforts to get every family to fill out the free and reducedprice meal application for next year — an extra challenge in the current political climate in which some immigrant families fear leaving a paper trail.
Last year, in addition to adding new revenuegenerating snacks in elementary schools, the district tried to recoup the debt by making weekly robocalls to parents, working with principals to do outreach to families, and in some cases sending letters home with students.
“We made a pretty hard push,” Peña said. “It did make an impact, but not as great an impact as we had hoped.”
Most districts nationwide accrue some debt for unpaid meals.
A 2016 survey by the School Nutrition Association found that threequarters of school districts rack up unpaid meal debt, up slightly from 71 percent two years before.
In Denver, the amount of lunch debt ranges widely by school, with some accruing less than $50 and others accruing thousands. Omar D. Blair Charter School had the highest lunch debt among Denver schools last year at $11,500. Meanwhile, Florida Pitt Waller, Joe Shoemaker Elementary, Thomas Jefferson High School, and Cheltenham Elementary all reported lunch debts between $2,500 and $5,000.
Chalkbeat Colorado is a nonprofit news organization covering education issues. For more, visit chalkbeat.org/ co.