School Lunch Shaming a Hot Button Issue Again
May 17, 2019 Lunch shaming is back in the national conversation after a couple of high-profile instances in two northeastern states. Many school districts have adopted the idea of offering different school lunches to students who have incurred lunch debt because the districts say that they have found no other way to pay the bill. The National School Lunch Program, created in 1946, provides meals to students at more than 101,000 schools at little or no cost. Estimates of the number of American children currently enrolled in the program exceed 31 million. Some students' families cannot afford to pay the cost, and so some schools have resorted to not serving those students the same food that is served to other students who do not have school lunch debt. A not uncommon sight at American schools is a child's being handed a bag containing a cold lunch, while other students in line get a hot meal, with the only difference being that the student who got the bag has an outstanding school lunch debt. At some schools, such students are made to wear wristbands or get a hand stamped, to identify them as debtors. In the most recently publicized examples:
Some states have taken actions to shut down the so-called lunch shaming. New Mexico outlawed it in 2017, and California, Iowa, and Oregon have passed similar laws. At the federal level, New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall in 2017 introduced the Anti-Lunch Shaming Act, which would have shielded schoolchildren from being the target of any confrontation regarding school lunch debt. The law would have prohibited schools from publicly identifying students who owed school lunch money, instead stipulating that schools communicate directly with parents. A similar bill in the house had 148 co-sponsors. Neither bill was passed. Most schools employ other means to address the issue, such as offering online payment systems or liaising with charitable organizations. A Texas eighth-grader recently started an online crowdsourcing campaign to eliminate an entire school district's school lunch debt, which exceeded $18,000. Elsewhere in the private realm, parents and schools have taken matters into their own hands:
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