this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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What is school lunch debt?
We're not ok in the USA
I'm in the USA, and I don't know what it is, either.
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
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.