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What is school lunch debt?
We’re not ok in the USA
In a nutshell, it’s capitalism at its worst.
Long story short, because giving students lunch on taxpayer money would be socialist, the USA decided to charge children to eat food made by the school cafeteria.
In theory this is good if you want to send your kid to school with food to eat, you don’t have to pay for lunches that your kid won’t eat, whether directly, or indirectly, through taxes.
In reality, kids, or more accurately, their parents, either can’t or won’t pay for the food that their kids eat from the school cafeteria, most notably the former.
Instead of simply not feeding the kids, they just accrue debt for eating the food prepared by the school for them.
Thus, school lunch debt represents the worst of capitalism. The kids, and/or their parents are being billed for the children eating food.
It’s weird to me because I didn’t go to a school with a working cafeteria (one that makes food) until highschool, and it was basically just a cafe in the school, you paid for what you wanted when you bought it from the cafeteria. No money, no food.
I was always sent to school from grade 1, with a lunch in hand because of this. I understand the convenience of having a school able to prepare and serve lunch to the kids, but I’m not aware of any where I am that do that. To be fair, I haven’t been in school that wasn’t a college/uni, for over 25 years. Maybe things have changed here? IDK.
To add to this. Some schools won’t give official graduation from various levels of school or diplomas if you have lunch debt
it is when the parents cant pay for a kids lunch at school, they have some leeway to go into the negatives but after a while if it still isnt paid the kids are denied the usual lunch and are given a cheese sandwich
happened to me on the ONE day they had fried chicken for lunch (and they never had it again for the rest of my school days). as a football player it was absolutely horrible because i refused to eat the shitty ass dry ass cheese sandwich and then i had zero energy for practice after school. school lunches shouldnt even be fucking charged its just a way for the school to squeeze some more money into their pockets
its just a way for the school to squeeze some more money into their pockets
It’s not even necessarily that, it’s usually just that the entire funding structure for the school doesn’t allow them to re-allocate city/state funds to paying for lunches, and even if they did have excess funds they could switch over, it would then result in key programs needed for kids to graduate being cut, because they’re so underfunded as is.
This is coming from someone who actively managed my prior high school’s yearly budget, and had numerous instances of district officials willfully ignoring emails and calls until being contacted by a higher-up dispute resolution office because they, in the end, didn’t have the resources to even stop serving illegally prepared (undercooked, not meeting nutritious standards, still frozen, etc) food.
That was even with nearly every student paying for lunch out of their own pocket. Our entire model for funding schools in this country is a disgrace from top to bottom.
Every time I read about this I remind people of the Iowa governor.
The feds offered free money to help clear Iowa kids lunch debt.
Iowa governor Kim Reynolds turned it down because “we are in an obesity epidemic”.
Read that a couple of times to yourself just to let it sink in. Conservatives are about hurting people just so they can get a couple of easy points in the polls, even if it means literally letting innocent children of poor families go hungry.
Obesity can actually be caused by not eating enough
No really, your body thinks you’re in a time of famine and holds onto EVERYTHING it can… You also get more stressed which causes your body to store your adrealine as extra fat.
i think my body is broken because it has always held on to everything it can :/
The trigger for that is epigenetic, that is, it’s caused by genes by they aren’t always active. There’s a “blocker” molecule on the DNA that prevents those sections from being used for making proteins. When certain things change in the environment, you can gain or lose those blocker molecules.
One of them controls fat storage, and activates during starvation to encourage your body to hold onto any nutrients it can get. Because it is genetic though, it’s inheritable. So if any of your parents or grandparents went through a famine or a time of starvation, the epigenetic marker could have been removed and you inherit that missing marker, causing your body to store fat more than other people who have the marker still.
this is unbelievable, my great great grandparents immigrated to america during the great famine of mount lebanon, this could be why my body stores so much. thank you for the reply
If a kid was able to do this by saving his allowance, then it can’t possibly be very much compared to resources of a school or its surrounding tax base. Give the kids their food.
It’s a news article from 2019 for Ryan Kirkpatrick at Westpark Elementary School (a public school in Irvine California). He paid off the debt for only his 3rd grade class (not the whole school, not the whole 3rd grade, just his class). It was a total of $74.50. However, the school still serves hot lunches to kids with a negative balance on their account.
Apparently he paid it anonymously. (???)
Just stating facts above, but yeah, my opinion is that all public school lunches should be free.
This, the problem is easily solved, but unforutnately the cruelty is the point, as some people still think “It builds character!”
When in reality it builds trauma
Yeah usually they’d cut kids off from lunch after like 10ish dollars of lunch debt for my school, like 5 meals behind max.
So a class worth of school lunch debt legit might be like 100$, and prevent a handful from being allowed lunch anymore. The level of petty is absurd.
Thought this comment was going in a different direction there for a second… was about to be very upset that “it’s ok because it’s not that much”
School lunch debt
Just fucking look at those words.
If you have kids and you live in a country where that phrase exists, and you’re not doing anything about it, you’re not a human any more
Americans hate women, it’s simple. Who is disproportionately affected by hungry children? Who has limited bodily autonomy? We can point to the Republicans for wearing that hate publicly, but Democrats haven’t done their part to sign laws that would fix this. Women in America hate women too, it’s weird.
Fuck you, I’m in California don’t lump us in with that shit.
I had never heard of free lunch before the US. Don’t get me wrong, this is awesome but that was not something where I grew up (Europe). That being said, all education and higher education was basically free. No free lunches, but no crazy tuitions.
Where I live in norway it is not like you could buy lunch either. People made lunch at home and took to school. Usualy a piece of bread and slice of brown cheese. May be different in huge schools.
And anyways if someone had forgot, the teachers had a backup solution, for free.
Doesn’t this kids parents pay for it? How else does he get “allowance”?
I know another way parents can contribute to the so-called lunch debt…
Wait what if everyone just paid a little bit of money so that kids could eat. Even people without kids would pay and it would just be taken out of their pay… or kids can go hungry…
I make my kids lunches every day. I still would if they were free, and school lunch should be free.
I wish I could comprehend why some people think hungry kids is OK. At the same time… I kind of don’t want to understand them. I want them to not be selfish pieces of shit instead.
Usually the excuse I hear on the ‘‘we can’t just feed children’’ crowd is that they don’t want their tax money, or anyone else’s helping the WRONG children. Often they mean non white children. There’s a strong history in white supremacy of stopping people from feeding black children, government or private efforts, the FBI has killed people over it.
Oh I know the excuses they give (and the racism behind so much of it). I just can’t comprehend why, which is why I say I don’t want to understand, just have them, you know, not be shitty.
At least locally there is a push for it which I’m advocating for. We just got preschool for free too, so that’s a step in the right direction - lunch is next on the docket, I expect some battles there…
So many of them are afraid. The fear centre in a conservative’s brain is show to work overtime compared to others’.
If you want to see the number on your paycheque go up you have two options: get paid more or pay less in tax. You have some semi-direct power over the government when you vote and vague transparency means that you kinda know where the money is going. Raising your pay, though, is a lot harder. You have no safety net and you know that executives and middle management are big babies so losing income and references is very dangerous. You basically have to be incredibly gentle with those people or even put yourself down or they will hurt you without a moment’s thought for a quick buck and a little petty revenge.
You run through those cycles enough times and you get a large group of people with fucked up generational/cultural trauma where they will blame the government for letting corporations do things like leave for other countries instead of being mad at the corporations for abandoning us so that number go up. They’ll blame immigrants for taking the jobs but not the companies for firing locals to brutally exploit migrants who are just trying to survive. They are so used to the evil of corporations that they’re numb and call others crazy for wanting things to change.
Basically even the best intentioned ones are profoundly stupid cowards who have turned to the most wild levels of simping for people they know are evil because they’re afraid of being punished. They go after anyone who might make the corporations angrier and meaner, usually the government and the implementation of taxes and regulations, and punch down because they don’t even have the courage to punch laterally, let alone upwardly.
(And now a lot of them are just generationally brainwashed wahooo)
This story should help you comprehend that crowd. In their ideal world, hungry children pull themselves up by their bootstraps because being hungry motivates them to work harder. Children working to pay off their lunch debt is the pinnacle of their ideology.
I’m sorry. We’re too busy trying to take money from that system so we can give it to rich people who want to send their kids to private school
I am extremely cynical about the semi-frequent “fun runs” to raise money for cancer research or whatever in my city. It’s usually upper middle / upper class people feeling good about themselves for raising a couple of hundred bucks each, and diverting traffic and trams on the weekend (when this affected me I was a cafe worker commuting on the weekends).
You know how else we could fund this cancer research, and way more than your feel-good bullshit? Oh yeah, we could tax you properly. No more capital gains discount, etc.
I feel the same about Movember and my company promoting it. You know how else we could raise money for men’s health, company, you could pay more in tax. Just like a tiny bit more would be waaaaay more than the piddly little tax free donation you’re kicking in.
Charity fund-raising is only necessary because of the failure of the state, mostly. In my opinion.
I really doubt his parents specifically are the problem. They seem more than willing to give him enough money to do so, usually if my kids give me a financial goal I can afford I try and make it easier for them to get that amount of money.
Certainly not blaming the parents, glad it happened. Shame it had to happen. Confusing it happened in this way…
But think of all the jobs in the orphan crushing industry!
A heartwarming story here would be the pay kiosk for tracking lunch purchases being stolen or destroyed.
Paying off debt incurred to hungry children is insane shit.
It is a shame to have something like school lunch debts in the first place. This is something that should be free from the start.
Just doing what makes sense is so easy even a child does a better job then literal government.
Government keeps trying.
One side keeps saying no.
https://theintercept.com/2024/03/21/house-republicans-ban-universal-school-lunches/
One side says no and the other side lets them because it would be uncivil to take this debate to the streets.
“My team’s boots taste great!”
Authoritarianism bad mmmmkay?
Its not just an issue in the US though
It’s less of an issue in Europe at least. US news always sound like news from an alternate reality where humanity has gone down the dark path for me.
0 issue in Brazil I can say. People would laugh at the idea of making kids pay for food at public schools here
Love the player, hate the game.
I love his selfless attitude and hate that lunch debt is even a thing.
It’s an American thing. Assuming how it’s done in America is how it’s done in the rest of the world is just another form of American Exceptionalism.
Because it exists somewhere doesn’t mean I assume it happens everywhere. But that doesn’t matter, I hate that it’s a thing in America and I would hate it if it were a thing in another country. I hate it here and I’d hate it there, I’d hate it anywhere.
Training them to be good little wage slaves of the future. Already indoctrinated into a system of oppression that they’ll just accept because that’s how they were raised and they think it’s normal to owe money to everyone and never be able to be free.
Shit, that’s bleak. Probably not wrong though
Or, just maybe, he realizes he’s in a better position than most of those around him, and is willing to give extra so their lives would be better. You know, socialism.
Not sure I understand your point.
I’m sorry, I think I misread what you were saying. I thought you were referring to the kid in the picture and not his classmates. But perhaps this kid’s actions will give them some insight into the flaws of the system and just how little it would take to improve it.
I dont think it can get any worse than this
They could expand child labor to early 1900s levels.
Don’t worry, Republicans are making that a reality.
But in the past two years, child labor laws have entered the crosshairs of some lawmakers. At least 10 states have introduced or passed legislation loosening child labor protections, including New Hampshire. Now, Granite State children as young as 14 can work around alcohol and 16-year-olds can work an almost 40-hour week.
And then make feel good stories about how a child working in the mines pays for his dad’s cancer medicine? Nah that is only this decade’s stuff
Oh you sweet summer child…
That’s quite a condescending expression. “Condescending” means when you talk down to people
read again and realize what I am referring to or keep being glib both fine by me
