US moves to ban ‘lunch shaming’ kids at schools

LOS ANGELES — In some schools, children are forced to mop cafeteria floors. In others, their hot meal is taken away and thrown in the trash. In extreme cases, students are sent home with a stamp on their arm that reads “I owe lunch money.”

Such scenes, worthy of a Charles Dickens novel, have played out in schools across the United States as students whose parents fall behind in meal payments endure what is called “lunch shaming”.

The practice gained national attention at the start of the school year when a cafeteria worker in Pennsylvania quit in outrage after having to take away a child’s hot meal. More recently, the issue resurfaced after the state of New Mexico passed-the-first-of-its-kind-legislation banning lunch shaming.

Several other states, including California and Texas, are considering similar legislation, hoping to shield needy children from becoming pawns in a quarrel not of their making.

“The practice is everywhere,” said Jennifer Ramo, executive director of New Mexico Appleseed, an anti-poverty group that spearheaded the new law in the western state that has some of the highest child hunger rates in the country.

“We have heard of kids in some states standing in line with their tray of hot food and then they reach the cashier and find out they don’t have enough money on their account,” Ramo added. “So the food is literally thrown away and the child is given a cheese sandwich or nothing.”

By “shaming” the kids, she said, school officials believe parents will be spurred to pay the outstanding lunch bill.

Michael Padilla, a New Mexico state senator who sponsored the Hunger-Free Students’ Bill of Rights adopted last month, said he was driven to act given his own background growing up in poverty.

“When I was a kid, I had to mop the school cafeteria floors and put the tables and chairs down and up again and work in the kitchen,” he told AFP.

“But then fast-forward 30 years later, I come to find out that in Alabama they are stamping on a child’s arm ‘I don’t have lunch money’ and making the child go through their school day with that.”

According to a 2016 survey by the School Nutrition Association, a nonprofit group, about three quarters of school districts in the United States had unpaid student meal debt at the end of the last school year.

Schools differ in their response to the problem but typically they provide a child whose parents fall behind in payments a cheese sandwich instead of a hot meal.