Do you think school lunches should be free for all students, regardless of income?

Yes.

Yes. I can’t afford school lunches. I usually don’t eat at all during the school day because I don’t have any food.
The cheese “sandwich” Isn’t even a real sandwich. It’s 3 slices of gross processed cheese (occasionally with a ton of mold and maybe a bug or two) in between hard ass stale bread. I’ve eaten too many of those.
I feel that instead of spending so much money on making sure everyone has a computer (it’s a requirement to have a personal laptop in my school, the school supplies them), they should be spending money making sure no one goes hungry. We don’t need personal computers. We need FOOD

this applies to all schools.

I think food for all students should be free. If I remember correctly, we never paid for our lunches, it was just provided, but that was many years ago.

These rich people want to have a “cause”. This could be someone’s “cause”. Make sure every single school provides a free lunch to each student. And a free breakfast. No child left behind should now be No child goes hungry.

Lunch shaming? Jesus fucking Christ, is there anything you people don’t get shamed for?

After reading the article:
You don’t pay, you don’t get.
The lunch lady could’ve behave differently, but there is absolutely no shaming in there, and it’s definitely not anything to go to news for. it’s perfectly sensible that you don’t get what you didn’t pay for.

To answer the question: yes

PS: you people make yourselves seem more and more like a nation of ovesensitive pussies. “Lunch shaming”......smh.
God forbid anyone goes throught even the slightest inconvenience.

No such thing as “free”. Someone pays. Either the parent or the taxpayer.

@Sneki95 Are you raginloli’s evil twin? You can’t imagine a situation where a poor child is embarassed by an authority figure because her folks were too poor to pay for her lunch? What planet did you come from?

@elbanditoroso

No shit?

Yes. They should be made available to every student regardless of family income. I want them to eat. Poor nutrition is a major cause of student failure. I want the next generations to have all the tools to succeed, including a live, working brain. This is the primary responsibility of society. Just because some kid is from a rich family, that doesn’t guarantee a nutritious lunch, or one they will eat or not trade off. I’m ipretty sure I wouldn’t eat foie gras or anything with garlic at that age. And it is a no brainer when it comes to poor kids or kids from a substance abuse family.

Hell, I’m even for bringing back nap time up through high schools—and mandatory gym class. The lack of sleep and exercise is also a major cause of student failure.

By the way:

I am shocked to the core by this “lunch shaming”—evidently approved by school administrators. This has to be one of the meanest, counterproductive behaviours that I’ve ever seen in the people that we entrust the care and education of our next generations. And to me, it’s not the shaming as much as the purposeful delivery of lack of nutrition. This is prison guard mentality. The people who have allowed this to continue need to be humiliated and fired publicly for their attitudes and incompetence. And they are bloody lucky, because if I had my way, I’d have them dragged out of the schools into the street and shot live on TV. That would send a pretty good national message to any other administrator who allows things like this. WTF are these people thinking? How can anyone rationalize this?

@Espiritus_Corvus – I’m certainly not making excuses for the school; I think the idea of shaming kids is grotesque. To say nothing of the waste of food.

But let’s put the blame where it belongs. On the parents of the children. If the family has no money, there are any number of aid programs and helping mechanisms.

it’s the parents that are being irresponsible. The school is being cast as the bad guy here.

I’m neutral about lunches being free, maybe it’s because I come from a place where lunches aren’t readily served in the canteens and are only an option, but this act of shaming is just disgusting. There are many more effective and polite ways you can make the kid realize that she needs to pay for her lunch. You have just turned the kid into the center of shaming for the whole school, how do you feel about that?

Yes. I think if they are required by law to be at school they should be fed.

My daughter’s school allows a child to go up to a -$25 balance before they are served a peanut butter sandwich and apple. At least the parent and child has notice before they are shamed, unlike what happens at your school @jca. I send my daughter to school with her own lunch to avoid all this. Their lunches are usually gross anyway.

@janbb
All kids should be provided food, regardless of income. There’s no doubt about that.

But this is all wrong on so many damn levels.

The issue there is an administrative mistake. She applied for the free lunch, but papers got messed up. The lunch lady could’‘ve just said “Sorry, you’re not on the list, we can’t give you lunch” and then she could’ve said “But lady, I applied for free lunch, can you please check again” and then it would all be solved.

But noooo, let’s make this into a “big deal” and go over the news and waste out time on it. I mean, why solve a slight inconvenience if we can make a mountain out of a molehill and hog five minutes of fame?

“Lunch-shaming” my ass, where the hell are your heads?

People die all over the place and this kid comes and be like “I was humiliated because someone messed up the papers. Please pat me on the head and give me my pacifier”.

I just don’t know who is fucked up in there.

@Sneki95 This isn’t the only time this has happened. I’ve read about it happening in many school districts. Agree it is an administrative problem that needs to be addressed so kids are not put in this situation.

And I also agree that all kids should get a free school lunch but like so many good “socialistic” ideas that is one that ain’t gonna happen any time soon. We’ll be lucky if we still have free public schools by the end of this administration, let alone school lunches.

@elbanditoroso I gave up on relying on parents to raise their children properly long ago, with their rampant drug abuse, laziness, lousy priorities, and general lack of responsibility . It’s time to address the problem—poor nutrition that that cripples brain development for life in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. It sentences a kid to poor learning ability, poverty and a life of bad decisions. And multi-generational poverty, because those kids often grow up to become people just like their parents.

So, it’s time to address this as a societal problem and for society to take measures. We can afford school lunches for every student in the US if we’d get our priorities straight.

Goddammit, what is more fundamental than assuring our next generation has all the tools to have a better life than ours? Isn’t that instinctual? Isn’t it connected in the higher animals to the biological imperative? If not, what the hell are we even doing here?

Yes

As was already mentioned somewhere above, as a child of the 60’s our lunches were “free”, read: provided with equal menus for equal children. I don’t know what’s happened in this realm in the last 50 years but shaming children for needing a free lunch and serving cold cheese sandwiches while others receive hot lunches, this is complete and utter bullshit.

^^I remember those lunches as well. They were hot, nutritious and balanced. Notice our generation did not have the obesity problems the generations that came after us now have—and the resultant cardiac problems and early diabetes, which are costing the taxpayer much, much more than school lunches. The only time we had to pay was on Hot Dog Day, which was one Thursday a month. The hot dogs were cheap, even by 1960’s standards. Regular lunches were also available on Hot Dog Day, but few passed up a chance for a Hot Dog, a food that wasn’t considered especially nutritious and never offered at the regular daily lunches.

We had to pay in NJ or bring lunch from home. A menu was posted and you could decide day by day. I don’t know if there was a free lunch provided for some.

On a tangent but related, I read that Trump signed something rolling back some of the nutrition requirements for school lunches that Michelle Obama had gotten implemented. Like so many other things, we are moving in the exact wrong direction.

^^ Like the Reagan administration ruling Ketchup as a legitimate school lunch vegetable. It’s disgusting. You reap what you sow.

I went to in the 80s-early 90s, in a small town in Illinois. The lunches then were expected to paid for, but I know many of my schoolmates had to have been on free or reduced lunch program (this was a poor town with little real economic opportunity, my dad had one of the few decent paying jobs around). There was no difference between the lunches given to paying students or free/reduced students.

This kind of mean-spiritedness would, I think, have not been tolerated back then.

What EC said, all the way.

As for the article … It certainly wasn’t condoning the “lunch shaming” practice, but it didn’t say that schools were evil or horrible or anything like that. It was looking at an issue (students who don’t have reliable access to food/food funds) and the ways that schools are dealing with the issue, with the focus of the article on the clearly controversial lunch-shaming practice. It considered statistics like how a 2016 “School Nutrition Association” review found that “of almost 1,000 school lunch programs . . . Nearly 75 percent of districts had unpaid meal debt,” suggesting that there is an issue that schools may not be equipped to deal with… as well as other complexities to the issue, like why students who need or qualify for free or reduced-price lunches may still not have access to them. It also talked about a variety of strategies either being suggested or employed… For example, the last strategy mentioned in the article is the efforts by many schools/their teachers/interested parties to fundraise—whether as charities, or through community fundraising, or through websites like GoFundMe.

That doesn’t look like blaming schools to me, or making mountains out of molehills—it’s taking a complex issue, a controversial practice, and showing how there are many other options out there—if we can put them in motion. It’s looking out for the young people who walk into US schools every day, who are largely dependent on adults in the school and at home for their wellbeing, and who deserve to be treated with respect and dignity…

@Sneki95: The student whose parents aren’t paying for lunches isn’t responsible for the death and destruction happening in the greater world. The fact that worse things are happening in the world doesn’t give someone a right to treat another person badly-but-maybe-not-as-badly-as-elsewhere. The fact that worse things are happening in the world doesn’t mean that we can’t also focus on the bad-but-maybe-not-as-bad issues. We’ve got a lot of human brain power out there—divide and conquer and all that. We have space and resources to worry about both the worldwide deaths and the students who are being publicly shamed at school and given lesser quality food… And it seems to me that if we can’t have discussions about this “slight inconvenience,” we’re going to have a hard time talking about even larger and more complex issues.

A large part of a school’s job is to be an equalizer. Students come in with so many different experiences, so many different kinds of knowledge, so many differing abilities. A school must give every student who walks into its doors the best educational experience it can give that student, must give every student the best opportunities it can give that student. We have free public education because a student’s economic status isn’t supposed to matter, isn’t supposed to affect the quality of education they receive. Granted, we have a long way to go to reach that ideal, but the lunch shaming runs counter to it.

@Sneki95 This happens all over our country. The child that is being punished because a parent can’t pay or forgets to pay is shamed. The child sits in the lunchroom with a cold sandwich while their classmates sit around them and eat fried chicked, mashed potatoes, green beans and a cookie. It’s the other children that take notice and the cruel children then label that child as poor or worse. It is not the child’s fault for not having money to pay for the same meal that everyone else gets, but they are treated as though it is their fault.

No

We don’t have a system for hot lunches. All the kids bring sandwiches and healthy snacks from home.

The “poor child’s lunch” is kind of like saddling the child with a dunce cap, or a scarlett letter. It makes them stand out, and because plenty of kids are mean, that poor little child will be shamed, publicly. That is a horrible thing to a child.

I bought one liter of milk from a convenience store for a buck In junior high. The school charged $1.00 for a quarter of that. I rarely had breakfast of lunch. If it didn’t have money for lunch I stayed home and hid in the attic or microwaved a steak when my dad went to work. I would like free food. In Junior High we had a collection of extra food for students by donation. In Elementary school Fridays was hot dog day for $0.25 I loved that day. Came with steamed buns and condiments.

This reminds me a little of Oliver Twist’s experience in the workhouse when he asked for more. All children should be given a nutritious meal when at school and cheese sandwiches should be banned.

I have had the thing described in the article happen to me. I wasn’t even on reduced lunch. My mom simply forgot to pay. But I remember them making a big stink about it and as a unpopular kid it stung pretty hard. And I wasn’t even given a alternative lunch.

It seems like food should be pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things when you think about how much school costs per student. Oh noes a few dollars a day.

If we are going care so much about paying for calories consumed let’s look at how they are expended. Half+ of the land use at my highschool was sports related. Sure, kids need P.E. But just have them run around the parking lot.

This was my High School. Places in red are parking and where we actually learned. Sell off the fields and let the kids do laps in the parking lots and you know, provide food.

No

Yes