By Sara Ward
Associate Editor
When I think of school lunches, I think of flimsy trays holding food that could make even a person with the strongest stomach queasy. I can count on one hand the number of times I partook in the occasional daily school lunch offerings, choosing to bring my safer brown bag with food made of colors other than gross orange, yellow and tan.
Although the food the school district provided for my peers and I was mediocre at best, at least I can say that they provided something for their students.
That wasn’t the case in a recent situation at an irresponsible middle school when students in Attleboro, Mass., were denied lunch if they had a negative balance on their pre-paid lunch cards last week, according to an April 5 CNN.com article.
Five cents of debt was enough for cafeteria employees at Coehlo Middle School to make about 25 kids throw out food they normally would have eaten, according to the same article.
While I get that the school must have been trying to teach students responsibility with money, it’s going a little overboard when the kids are only 5 cents in debt. It seems like cruel and unusual punishment that students at this school went hungry simply because they were a nickel behind on their school lunch fees.
Apparently it’s the food vendor company policy that kids with a negative balance usually receive a cheese sandwich, a fruit and vegetable and milk, and the principal blamed the food company Whitson’s for the slip-up. Whitson’s claims the employees instituted the change in policy by themselves without approval.
It’s unfair for the school to deny children food just because they were unable to provide the money. In my school district, children who didn’t have the money for school lunch were able to sign up for a free lunch program. I think the cafeteria employees should have at least given the students a chance to do something like that before they made them go hungry.
The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a federally assisted meal program operating in nearly 95,000 public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions, according to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website. It provides nutritionally-balanced, low-cost or free lunches to more than 26 million children each school day.
If Massachusetts already uses the National School Lunch Program, I think it should have been considered in the case of these 25 children who didn’t have money for lunch.
Children from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty level (currently $21,710 for a family of four) are eligible for free meals in the program and between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level (currently $30,895 for a family of four) are eligible for reduced-price meals, for which students can be charged no more than 40 cents.
Not only that, but schools who use this program get reimbursed with cash for each meal served by the United States Department of Agriculture.
This is a win-win situation. Children will be fed, and schools will be paid for their efforts.
Even if the students that day didn’t qualify for the National School Lunch Program, it should have been investigated first before the school let them go hungry.
It’s understandable that there’s a lot of confusion surrounding the situation, but the officials in charge of providing students with school lunches should not be playing the blame game.
Some may say it would be just as easy for students to bring in a bagged lunch. However, it’s unfair to assume that every student can afford to bring his or her own food from home. It’s a right that students be able to get lunch at school.
There should be no confusion over whether a student gets a school lunch. They should be provided with some sort of food, no matter what.
It’s inexcusable to act like there was no control over what happened in the lunchroom that week. It’s scary that employees got away with forcing kids to throw out their meals simply because they didn’t have the money to pay for them.
When I have my own children some day, I want to have the security and knowledge that they are given everything they need while in school. School lunches should be considered a necessity, and it needs to remain a priority in every single school.
There need to be more specific rules and policies in place about school lunches so this kind of situation won’t happen again.
