Give Me Your Lunch Money
School lunch debt is skyrocketing with the expiration of Covid-era subsidies. With it come humiliating debt-collection tactics served on children.
A Lebanon, Ohio school’s announcement about “Ice Cream Friday” last week came with a warning.
“Tomorrow is the highly anticipated first ice cream Friday!” the school wrote on Facebook. “We wanted to send out a few reminders to hopefully make the day go smoothly for everyone. A student must have money on their account to purchase an ice cream. If a student has a negative balance they will not be able to purchase an ice cream even if they bring their $1 for ice cream.”
After seeing the post, Naiyozcsia King, a mother who runs a nearby restaurant, offered to pay off students’ outstanding lunch balances. The cost of sparing children from humiliation, and their families from the stress of debt, was $411.15.
Philanthropy like King’s hits the headlines every school year. A Missouri teen raised $400 to pay off former classmates’ lunch debts as school resumed in August. Valerie Castile, whose son Philando worked in a school cafeteria before he was killed by police at a traffic stop in 2016, has raised more than $200,000 to cancel students’ food debts.
But this year, school lunch debt is primed to skyrocket with the expiration of Covid-era programs that provided free lunch for school children. With that debt will come hunger, and the humiliating campaigns of debt collection against children.
During Covid’s peak, Congress combatted food insecurity by offering universal free breakfasts and lunches for children through their schools. That program expired last fall. This school year is the first to exist entirely in its absence. Another program, 2022’s “Keep Kids Fed Act” was designed to fill the gaps of expiring pandemic aid, by giving schools extra reimbursement for meals. That program also expired this June.
Children needed those programs, early data suggests. When lunches were free, schools served 80 million more lunches than they did pre-pandemic, NPR reported.
Without meal subsidies, schools are already seeing cafeteria tabs pile up. A survey from the School Nutrition Association this year found $19.2 million in school lunch debt.
Of the school districts that charge for lunch in the SNA survey, 96.3 percent “reported that the loss of the federal pandemic waiver allowing all schools to offer free meals to all students had caused an increase in unpaid meal charges/debt.” 86.8 percent of those schools reported “concerns/complaints from families,” while 86.5 percent reported an increased “paperwork/administrative burden” and 66.8 percent reported an increased “stigma for low-income students.”
That stigma comes as schools renew efforts to collect on lunch debts.
A series of pre-pandemic incidents drew national attention to “lunch-shaming,” a practice of publicizing a child’s unpaid school lunch debt. An Alabama school, for instance, inked a child’s arm with a stamp that read “I need lunch money.” Other schools made children clean cafeteria tables in front of classmates to pay back their outstanding balance. Some schools prepared separate, worse lunches for children who owed money.
And a Pennsylvania school district recently announced its intention to collect on lunch debt more aggressively this year, threatening that “all students with delinquent meal accounts can be barred from participating in extracurricular activities, field trips, dances, prom, and graduation, according to the policy,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported this month. “Report cards may also be withheld.”
Outrage at lunch-shaming has inspired some state-level laws intended to prohibit schools from singling out children experiencing lunch debt. But even when inadvertent, schools can shame students who have outstanding food balances.
After King paid off students’ lunch debt, the Ohio elementary school that warned of exclusion from “Ice Cream Friday” released a new statement, explaining that the policy was not intended to punish students with empty lunch accounts.
“This post inadvertently sent the message that we would embarrass students or turn them away for an issue outside their control. The message fell short of our values as a district and we sincerely apologize,” the district wrote in a Facebook post.
“The post was intended to communicate to Donovan parents how several district-wide rules apply to a la carte items purchased in the cafeteria. These rules are not new. Students who have a negative balance on their account are not turned away; they are provided a meal. Students are not allowed to purchase a la carte items if they have a negative balance in their meal account. Ice cream is an a la carte item. Therefore, if students have a negative balance on their meal account, they are not allowed to purchase ice cream. It is also important to note that we do not accept cash at our cafeteria registers. We also do not permit students to purchase food for their classmates without prior parent permission.”
The school also reported a surge of donations through a neighborhood charity organization, and announced that all children received ice cream on Friday.
Great! I bet everyone liked that. Hey, what if school lunches were just always free? Certainly we could afford to make them free.
The national public school meal debt is $262 million, annually per the Education Data Initiative. In the interest of comparison, the F-35 jet that went missing last week cost about $100 million, and F-35s are a documented disaster, “mission-cable” only 55 percent of the time, due in part to a borderline extortionate deal with defense contractor Lockheed Martin, which has a proprietary claim that prohibits the U.S. military from looking up basic information on how to fix the oft-broken aircraft. The F-35 program is expected to cost the U.S. $1.7 trillion over its lifespan. That’s a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Maybe free lunches would even be a net positive in cold, fiscal terms, once the workforce started seeing the benefits of people who attended school undistracted by debt and hunger.
But I don’t think governments are considering raw math when they decide to let food programs for children fail.
The American insistence on extracting small-dollar payments from eight-year-olds every day strikes me as weirdly petulant: a system designed to emphasize control and optimize embarrassment. We don’t send children itemized receipts for their schools’ electricity bills, their gym equipment, their textbooks. Why do we only bill for food, a basic need? Universal free school meals could be an equalizer, lifting all families to a basic standard of food security. Instead, schools have turned debt-collection into a legible marker of class inequality: the stamp on a child’s hand, the cafeteria chores performed before peers, the inferior “alternative” lunch for students who owe money.
These shaming tactics amount to a cruelty that far outweighs $411.15 on a balance sheet. But the greater shame is that individual donors like King are left to cover the gaps where lawmakers won’t.
”I have been a parent that has had a balance with a school system before,” King told Ohio’s WXIX. “So immediately, and I didn’t have it then, but I have it now, to be a change. So, that’s why I did it because I was one of those parents before. So, I could relate.”
Speaking of public responsibilities, I have jury duty this week! I’ve never been called before, but my number is finally up. Here’s what I’m reading while I wait to learn whether I’ll be dismissed:
-Anne Helen Peterson has a great interview in her newsletter with Amanda Monei, author of the new book Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control. Monei notes how the language of women’s liberation has been used to mask the coercive forces around motherhood and women’s sexuality, and to discourage women from seeking better. (I remember once tweeting that child care is too expensive, only for a deluge of anti-choice internet personalities to tell me I had no right to complain because I’d chosen to have kids.) Going to block-quote Monei because she’s right on:
“The language that circles around assault, violation, violence against women, and just general sexual politics, is echoed in how we talk about motherhood. In parenting discourse, though, it’s all watered down and sentimentalized and rife with cliche, such that the exploitation and degradation and suffering of the bodies at work in the institution of motherhood appear to be… not that bad. But it is bad!
“That phrase ‘she asked for it’—and really just that notion that we make choices and then because we made a choice we can‘t critique the institutions and systems and policies and cultural demands and exploitation we come up against after making those choices—also captures how choice is frequently weaponized against women. In America, we are so invested in the neoliberal myth of free will that people tend to get very prickly around the suggestion that, actually, culture and politics have a big hand in the shaping of things like identity, intimacy, and family, even choice!”
-Nebraska has sentenced a woman to two years in prison for furnishing false information to police and concealing human skeletal remains, after she helped her teenage daughter obtain abortion pills. The teenager, who stated in court that she had been in an abusive relationship with the man who impregnated her, was sentenced to 90 days in prison. “Reproductive justice experts warn that Jessica Burgess’s sentencing Friday is a harbinger of things to come,” the Appeal noted last week. A new slate of legislation and judicial opinion seeks to crack down on people who help others obtain abortions.
-A massive new report from the anti-censorship organization PEN America found a 33 percent spike in book bans during the 2022-2023 school year. More than 40 percent of those bans occurred in Florida, which has passed severe legislation restricting how educators can address issues like race and gender. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “authors whose books are targeted are most frequently female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals,” the PEN America report notes. But, “amid a growing climate of censorship, school book bans continue to spread through coordinated campaigns by a vocal minority of groups and individual actors and, increasingly, as a result of pressure from state legislation.”
-From me in The Daily Beast: the progressive campaign group Run For Something is planning a $10 million investment in school and library board races over the next two years, with the aim of combatting candidates from far-right groups like Moms for Liberty.
That’s this week’s MomLeft! Thanks for reading! If you liked this newsletter, please consider subscribing, recommending it to a friend, or doing some kind of occult ritual to get me out of jury duty! See you next Sunday.