<p>Schools are not required to provide lunch; quite a few do not. Schools that continue to lose money on their school lunch programs may decide to shut down the lunch program entirely. Costs to provide school lunches have risen substantially, and schools can’t afford to absorb $3.50-5.00/day/child in unpaid lunch bills without dipping into other accounts. How long do you let it go? School budget are screechingly tight – what do you cut when your food service unit loses $25K? Many schools I have worked with lose money on every free/reduced price meal, and with the transition to not allowing a la carte sales, their food service programs run on tighter margins. </p>
<p>I think it is in the next week or so when our newspaper publishes the names and addresses of every property owner who has failed to pay property taxes, a publication that will be available on the web close to forever.</p>
<p>I think the story made it sounds worse than it might actually be. We don’t know the details. At our elementary schools, like others have said, each student has their own account, and money can be deposited to that account to pay for lunches and extras (extras might be chips or ice cream or extra milk, etc depending on the day). The kids get their hand stamped if the money in that account runs low. A student who gets free lunch would normally only get their hand stamped if they were trying to buy the extras and did not have money in their account for that, not simply for getting free lunch. Some kids get reduced priced lunch instead of free lunch, so they would need to pay for some of the lunch and would get their hand stamped if their account runs low. That hand stamp has nothing to do with income. When kids run out of money in their account, the stamp reminds them and their parents to send more in to replenish the account. Usually the cafeteria can lend them the money for a day or two, but if their isn’t a deposit in a couple days then they do have to switch to the cheese sandwich option. If they didn’t do the stamp, odds are that more kids would not get the hot lunch because there would not be that simple reminder. There are other reminders that go home, by email and or by note, but many have no email, or don’t check it regularly and notes get stuffed in the bottom of a backpack and forgotten.</p>
<p>I’m not saying schools shouldn’t go after parents who don’t pay their bills and should just eat the cost, but I think they can come up with a less inappropriate way to do it than forcing a child to wear a brand all day every time it happens. Leave the kids out of it, it is not their problem.</p>
<p>It’s interesting to me that this problem exists outside of the free lunch program. When I was in school we paid cash for lunch, and if you didn’t bring lunch money, you got no lunch unless you packed one. End of story. When did we start giving away lunches on credit to kids whose parents do not qualify for the free lunch program and why?</p>
<p>That was the way it was, before schools started to go the the single-payer, for some reason that I don’t understand. Now, you set up an account, fund it with your credit card, and then your kid just draws on it using their ID card or #. When the balance gets low, they send you a letter.</p>
<p>The problem is that the system is filled with abuse and snafus, with meals appearing on your bill that you never consumed.</p>
<p>I agree that old fashioned cash is the best way to do things. although I guess it exposes the food service operator to employee theft in a different way than the prepaid account does.</p>
<p>Actually, it is because of not wanting to stigmatize F/RL kids that cafeteria’s moved away from cash. When kids who paid full price forked over $2.50 in cash, and kids who got free lunch didn’t fork over anything, it was obvious who was getting free lunch. All these systems were designed to get around that one problem. </p>
<p>We give lunch (some kind of lunch) to kids who haven’t brought in money or who forgot a sack lunch because kids learn better with food in their tummies. It is the same reason schools used to have a stash of granola bars and similar foods for kids who showed up at the nurse’s office with tummyaches after no breakfast. Now many schools have full breakfast programs in addition to lunch programs.</p>
<p>Re: Post 62. Our school (enrollment 600) had about 6% on Free/reduced lunch. Those same kids also qualified for breakfast, but they closed the breakfast program because so few kids (of any means) visited the cafeteria for breakfast.</p>
<p>I guarantee you that “branding” of these youngsters is more traumatic to the posters on this boards than it is to the actual students affected by it. Classic making a mountain over a molehill.</p>
<p>I think our district has half who qualify, for frl, which is similar to national average.
Breakfast if I remember right was pretty awful.
Waffle sticks & flavored yogurt was a staple.
Even when we were on food stamps, I didnt have them eat the school breakfast.</p>
<p>I’m reading the article as the school stamps the hands of every child who has less than the cost of a full priced lunch in their account, and then possibly makes them eat the dreaded “cheese sandwich”. So, students on free lunch are getting stamps every single day, which would make them stand out. In addition, it seems like possibly the students on free lunch are being given less choice, and made to take a cheese sandwich, when other children are able to choose things like pizza.</p>
<p>I don’t have a problem with hand stamps as a way to say “hey, your account is running low” when you have 1 or 2 days of money left, but if your lunch costs $0, then 1 or 2 days is still $0, and you should never be getting a mark, as opposed to always getting a mark.</p>
<p>I’ll also say that as someone who skipped lunch and pocked the money every day for all of high school, I think there are a wide variety of reasons why a school might choose to go to alternative forms of payment, beyond just privacy and employee theft, including making sure that the money sent from home isn’t lost, stolen, or re-appropriated. As a parent whose kid chose to buy a lot in middle school, I also liked the fact that I could add a couple of hundred dollars to his account online and then forget about it for weeks or months, rather than searching under the couch cushion for exact change every day.</p>
<p>? Students on free lunch get hot lunch. I’m trying to think why a free lunch student would ever be given a cheese sandwich (unless cheese sandwiches were on the menu for lunch that day.)</p>
<p>Because I think it is against the law to deny a hungry child at a public school something to eat. I’m sure there are people that know a lot more than me that can answer.</p>
<p>Except sometimes a kid was given a lunch and ate the whole thing at snack and then gets hot lunch on top of it, charging the parent even though they sent a lunch. And sometimes the kid gets way more than they should get every day but the school didn’t allow the parent to say “only allow the kid to get the hot lunch, no extras.” OR, the kid decides the hot lunch sounds better than the packed lunch they have so they pretend they don’t have a lunch. </p>
<p>When I was in school we had lunch cards that were punched with a purchase. They were different colors if you got free, reduced, or paid full price for your lunch.</p>
<p>Here all kids must put in their lunch number no matter how they pay. Most kids in the schools here get free lunch. Even those that qualify for only reduced are just given free.</p>
<p>I don’t have a problem with the hand stamps for kids running out of money. My youngest likes to buy extras too much. She is always running out of money. Before we got the computerized tracking she would be 2-3 meals in the negative before she would tell me she needed more money. The caferteria workers were telling her everyday she would just forget to tell me she needed money. Seeing a hand stamp would have stopped her from falling so far behind. I think a simple hand stamp would be less embrassing for kids then being told daily they are out of money. And no I don’t think it is realistic to have a cafeteria worker call home to tell parents they need to send money. The cafeteria people do not work full time here, except for the manager, and they all have a lot to do in the hours they do work.</p>
<p>Now we have an online system and I have it set to send me an email when the balance falls below a set point. I can also see exactly what she buys. This is the best solution.</p>
<p>I think one way to get help kids grow up is to start treating them like potentially rational beings rather than as dumb animals. What is so hard about “I’m giving you this note to give to your mom?” Even if the kid forgets that day, if you remind him a few times, he’ll likely eventually deliver the message. Sure, that message might need to be backed up with an e-mail or phone-call, but the idea that the only possible way of conveying information is a hand-stamp is silly to me. Presumably, this school has other ways of reaching parents, unless they write their invitations to parent-teacher nights in henna running down the kids’ arms. And frankly, if a parent is so negligent that they don’t remember to provide adequate funds for the child, aren’t involved enough to notice a note in a child’s bag, and are unreachable by phone and e-mail, a stamp may not do it either. </p>
<p>I just don’t see that it is beyond the bounds of reason to expect a school that has a computer system tracking student funds to generate an automatic message to the parents when the funds fall below a certain amount, or simply to produce a list of names and let the individual classroom teachers follow up with the parents of their students. </p>
<p>Really, how much of an issue is this, financially? The poorest students pay nothing in the first place. Of the others, I expect that the parents who routinely fall behind on payment fall into two groups: either they are good for the money but somewhat absent-minded, in which case you probably won’t have to make a massive effort to get them to pay what they owe relatively quickly, or they are so dysfunctional that you could send a singing telegram to their door and they still wouldn’t pay up. The number of people who otherwise wouldn’t have ever paid but will because of this policy strikes me as likely too small to warrant the risk of embarrassing and infantilizing the children you are supposed to be nurturing and educating.</p>
<p>I can just see the reaction of classroom teachers asked to follow-up with parents who have kids who’ve run up school lunch debt. </p>
<p>Actually, that’s a reaction I’d prefer not to see, especially if I’m a school administrator.</p>
<p>According to Dr. Google, the school in question DOES use a system that sends an email to the parent whenever the student’s lunch balance drops below a certain amount. This is a pretty standard system in fairly wide use. But, as already has been mentioned by other posters, a significant chunk of parents don’t open emails from school, or don’t open them consistently. That already drives schools a little crazy.</p>
<p>Are people who worry about stuff like this afraid other kids will be embarrassed or are they the ones who actually are embarrassed? Personally, I don’t care one way or the other stamp or no stamp and I doubt my kids would care either. What’s more, if they did they wouldn’t be embarrassed but rather they would be mad at me for not paying the bill, just the way they are mad at me when I’m late picking them up or when dinner is fish. lol</p>
<p>And yeah, school district politics can get pretty heated.</p>
<p>It’s just one example, but in my school the office secretaries did all the phoning of parents over late cafeteria payments, because teachers were teaching and not sitting by a phone. Parents call back all through the day, and there are too many interruptions over small change. If the office sent us billing notes, always in sealed envelopes for confidentiality, we’d stuff them into kids’ backpacks. And when they cared a lot about a letter, they put a stamp on an envelope and mailed it. These correspondences over FRL were not stamp-worthy.</p>
<p>IIRC, they also didn’t want teachers to know which children were on FreeReducedLunch, and which not.</p>
<p>It really surprises me that more people don’t have a problem with the school making a mark on kids’ bodies. That seems totally out of bounds to me.</p>