Lunch balances sent to collection
Students owed district $6,308 in 2018
Not seeing an end to unpaid lunch balances and failure to recover $5,900 in lunch fees from last year, the Daniel Boone Area School District is sending delinquent accounts to collections agencies.
Finance Committee Chairman Michael D. Wolfe said the district recovered just $407 of $6,308 due in unpaid lunches in 2018.
“The district is already $500 in arrears to the same individuals as last year,” said Wolfe.
“The business office reaches out to them and provides the application form for free or reduced lunches, but they don’t complete them,” he added. “Are they embarrassed to fill out the paperwork?”
Pennsylvania’s National School Lunch Program provides free lunches to “children from families whose income is at or below 130 percent of the poverty level, and children in families receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and children in families receiving Food Stamp benefits.”
“Children in families whose income is between 130 and 185 percent of the poverty level are eligible for reduced price lunches,” says the National School Lunch Program website from the state Department of Education.
According to a CNN story in May 2019, 75 percent of the country’s school districts report they had student “meal debt” at the end of the 2016-17 school year.
Several states, including Pennsylvania, have passed laws to prevent “lunch shaming.”
Pennsylvania’s Act 55 of 2017 includes provisions for communicating negative balances to ninth- through 12th-grade students.
No communication is to be made with students in kindergarten through eighth grade — negative balances may only be discussed with a student’s parent or guardian.
Act 55 says that students may not be publicly identified or stigmatized, nor may they be required to do any chores or other work to pay for their school meal.
Students must also be provided with complete school program meals.
The law allows for school districts to adopt a policy that restricts privileges/activities for students with lunch debt.
“We’re sending parents to collections, and at graduation, they don’t get their diploma,” said Wolfe.
“If we could track the unpaid lunch debt for a number of years, we could possibly deny participation in extracurricular activities,” Wolfe said.
In other business at the Sept. 9 meeting, Superintendent Brett A. Cooper introduced the Student School Board Representatives for the 2019-2020 school year.
They are juniors Mason Jolivette and Zoe Sweet, and senior Austin Longin.
Sweet, whose older sister, Gabrielle, served as a Student School Board Representative for two years and graduated in 2016, said she wants to correctly portray her fellow students, their clubs and other activities to the school board.
She is a member of TSA, Model UN, Future Business Leaders of America, and a member of student government since her freshman year in high school.
Sweet said her career goals are focused on government and law.
“We’re sending parents to collections, and at graduation, they don’t get their diploma.” — Finance Committee Chairman Michael D. Wolfe