Should Quakertown send lunch debts to collections?
A new school lunch debt policy in Quakertown sends bills of $1,000 or more to a collection agency and prohibits students with delinquent accounts from participating in activities such as dances and a graduation ceremony. The policy comes after Quakertown saw its lunch debt reach $27,000 at the end of the 2018-19 school year. The district dipped into its budget to subsidize the debt, meaning taxpayers picked it up. What do you think of the district’s policy?
Good for Quakertown school district
Good for the Quakertown school district. School lunches aren’t very expensive. If a student has run up a thousand dollar tab, that comes out to several hundred lunches that the student’s parents haven’t paid for.
Since school is only about 180 days a year, we can assume that this student hasn’t paid for a couple of years worth of lunches. The school should expect that money to be paid because I don’t know of any other entity that would allow this to happen.
People are taking advantage of our schools by doing this. The schools should be explaining to their students why certain privileges are being taken away. Apparently the schools also need to explain this to the parents. Kyle Gabovitz Bethlehem
Don’t block students from graduation ceremonies
It doesn’t seem fair to prohibit students from participating in dances or graduation ceremonies because their parents failed to pay the students’ lunch bill on time. The school district should not allow any parents to let lunch bills to reach $1,000 before taking serious action.
I believe the school has an obligation to take serious action when the lunch bill is more than four weeks past due. A serious letter should be sent to the parents when this occurs. The parents should be given 10 days to pay before a weekly interest charge of 2% will be added to the bill. If that doesn’t work, when the bill reaches $100 it should be turned over to a collection agency.
It’s certainly not fair to have all the other parents end up paying these delinquent lunch charges. Bob Halsey Lower Macungie Township
We used to pack lunches or buy ‘lunch tickets’
My first eight years of grade school was at a Catholic school, and we had no cafeteria, so we all had packed lunches that we ate at our desks. The responsibility for our food supply was on our parents and/or guardians then, as it should be now.
I do agree that the deadbeat parents and/or guardians should be held responsible for any debt incurred, but I don’t think that the students should be held back from extracurricular activities, especially graduation.
I seem to recall that when I graduated to high school, we purchased “lunch tickets” that we used at the cafeteria. That seemed to work very well. If you didn’t have enough money on the ticket, you either bought another ticket or you didn’t eat. Pretty simple, huh? Robert C. Nickisher Upper Macungie Township
Set up prepaid accounts for lunches
The program that many schools have established to provide nourishment for children needs to be reviewed and monitored prior to debts that climb to unacceptable amounts. It seems punitive to prohibit the student from participation in the activities, if the parent is responsible for the fees required.
Perhaps the method of paying needs to be reviewed and required ahead of time, like a prepaid account system. The account would cut off if not supplemented by a target date. Students with funding issues can usually be helped behind the scenes with grants and funding sources.
There must be a way to obtain donations for nutritional snacks for students without funding on days the account is depleted. A voucher could be issued for the day the account is depleted. A follow-up contact with the parent to replace the account by the end of the week seems reasonable.
A format that improves the large debt accumulating prior to the need for punishment and debt seems like common sense. A minimal debt issue may emerge at times, but to allow this to snowball demonstrates non-accountability for the school district’s policy. Doris Farrar Lower Macungie Township
Penalties could provide lesson for students
The Quakertown school district’s $27,000 lunch debt was for the 2018-19 school year, up from $5,000 just two years earlier and expected to rise to $40,000 this year. It also says the problem is not with low-income families but with those who can pay but simply don’t. Since lunches are important for student learning, lunches will not be stopped; the target is the parents.
There needs to be a way to identify families that cannot pay. There also needs to be some appeal process in place so that an apparently able-to-pay family who actually cannot pay has a private way of getting the debt waived or delayed until their situation improves (perhaps they are paying $12,000 per month on grandpa’s cancer meds or the divorced noncustodial parent has stopped paying child support).
Barring students from extracurricular activities punishes them while it is their parents who are at fault. But finding other means to get the parents to pay may not be possible without long and costly litigation.
It could be argued the debt is a drop in the bucket for a district with a $110 million budget, but not dealing with this would encourage some parents to say “others don’t pay so neither will I.” Hitting the students with a penalty for their parents’ failures could even be a teaching moment: Unpaid debts have consequences; don’t follow your parents’ lead. Douglas Marsh Salisbury Township