School lunch shaming is a practice where students are publicly humiliated for not having enough money to buy lunch. And it happens in a variety of ways. Some schools stamp students’ hands with the words, “I need lunch money,” as happened recently in Alabama. Or they take away hot, nutritious meals from students and give them sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwiches instead, as seen in one district in Rhode Island. School administrators have even sent debt collectors after families with overdrawn lunch accounts. It’s a practice that stigmatizes children and largely impacts marginalized populations.
Nonprofit leaders, school activists and government officials are working to end lunch shaming. A school cafeteria worker quit her job after being forced to throw away a first grader’s lunch because he didn’t have money to pay for it. Her story inspired legislators in Pennsylvania to ban lunch shaming.
Another approach to ending lunch shaming is through the government program called Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). By adopting CEP, schools in high poverty areas can opt for the entire student body to receive free breakfast and lunch. This way, kids don’t go into debt and cannot be shamed.
Watch the video to learn more about lunch shaming and how some people are working to end it.
More: School Lunches Still Aren’t Delicious or Nutritious. That Has to Change
Tag: school lunch policy
The Surprising Story Behind One School’s Healthy Lunch Program, The Best Way to Reach Your Reps and More
Revenge of the Lunch Lady, The Huffington Post Highline
In a country where cheap mass-produced food is king and pizza counts as a vegetable, healthy lunches for kids can be hard to come by. But a recent revamp of school fare in Huntington, W.V., previously designated as the nation’s unhealthiest city, provides a hopeful model. There, an enterprising employee managed to implement a healthy lunch program, starring locally grown produce, while maintaining the district’s minuscule $1.50-per-meal budget.
Getting a Busy Signal When You Call Congress? Here’s How to Get Through, The Christian Science Monitor
Since President Trump’s inauguration last month, there’s been a surge in citizens reaching out to Congress, but not all forms of communication are equally effective. If you really want your voice heard, say experts, try meeting with your representative in person, writing a personal letter and focusing on policy rather than cabinet picks.
The Compost King of New York, The New York Times
New York City alone generates 1 million tons of organic waste per year, but a new plant on Long Island will process this waste into both fertilizer and clean energy, generating significant returns. This new large-scale industrial waste processing is both more environmentally friendly and more profitable than traditional composting, and could revolutionize American energy.
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This Urban School District Is Promising Free Meals For Every Child
A bologna sandwich: That’s what students of Shelby County Schools in Memphis, Tenn., received for lunch if they forgot to bring the $2 or so to pay for their food.
Nothing: That’s what some impoverished students (80 percent qualify for free lunch) would rather sit with in the cafeteria than be revealed as the “poor kid” to their classmates.
“We see kids every day that don’t go through the lunch line because they don’t want to be identified as that kid who gets a free meal. That stigma is huge,” Tony Geraci, the executive director of Shelby County Schools’ nutrition program, tells The Commercial Appeal.
But come this school year, that will all change. The school system will be serving three meals to every single student in the district — breakfast, lunch and dinner — all for free, regardless of how wealthy their family may be.
It’s due to a federal program that’s changing the way cash reimbursements for school lunches are distributed. Rather than judging individual families in relation to the poverty line, the government is now looking at the economic well-being of entire cities. Known as the “community eligibility provision,” the program kicks in once 40 percent of the school district’s population is considered low-income (largely based on signups for food stamps). Reimbursements in Memphis will now doled out based on how many meals are served in a cafeteria rather than how many poor kids attend a school, creating an incentive to serve additional meals.
Nutritious meals had been (and continue to be) correlated with academic performance. One 2002 study undertaken by a Harvard Medical School professor found that students “at nutritional risk” missed more days of school and expressed more anxiety and aggression — areas that all showed improvement six months later when a free breakfast program was implemented. It may sound simplistic, but a plate of chicken or lasagna could the difference between kids who pay attention to their teacher and the ones who focus on their empty stomach, a divide that largely falls on economic lines.
America’s subsidized school lunch programs date back to World War II, when many young men were rejected from the draft due to the lingering physical consequences of childhood malnutrition. The National School Lunch Act, passed in 1946 as a “measure of national security,” got a major update in 1998 when Congress agreed to start paying for snacks for youngsters in certain after-school extracurriculars. Launched experimentally in 2010, the latest expansion goes even farther, ensuring there’s food on every child’s plate at every meal. It’s part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s signature “Let’s Move!” campaign to end childhood obesity.
Supporters say the latest plan is essential to preventing hunger in classrooms in Memphis and across the country — Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, parts of New York City and elsewhere. Not only does “community eligibility” eliminate stigma for children who’d otherwise qualify for free or reduced lunch, it also ensures that other students — the ones who didn’t file their annual paperwork, others who may be just above the poverty cutoff or some of the growing number of homeless youth — don’t fall through the gap. For several kids, not eating a healthy meal at school means not eating at all.
“Kids won’t be going home and saying, ‘I’m hungry,’ and their mother just says, ‘I don’t have anything for you to eat,’ and not enough money to go to the market maybe,” one student in Baltimore, Adria Johnson, told the local news station when her district qualified. All together, nearly 6.4 million students across 13,800 districts are now being fed by the expanded criteria. In Memphis alone, parents will save $1.8 million they previously forked over for lunch.
“Stigma really overshadows a lot of the great things we do,” Geraci says. “For once, we’ll be able to have a program where we can say, now it’s time to learn, now it’s time to eat, now it’s time to play. That’s huge for this district.”
No Lunch Left Behind: One Mother’s Moving Mission
“Don’t Deny Kids Lunch, Dowagiac Schools!”
That’s the message one Michigan mother is spreading after a school official threw out her teenage son’s meal over a $4.95 debt on his account. Even though the outstanding debt was paltry, it warranted the punishment per school policy, which denies hot lunches to students who owe any amount of money on their accounts. For Dominic Gant, a junior at Dowagiac Union High School in Dowagiac, Michigan, the incident was understandably humiliating because it happened in such a public way: “It was really embarrassing, especially in front of the whole class,” he told ABC 57.
The situation didn’t sit well with Gant’s mother, Amanda Keown, who immediately contacted school officials after she heard about her son losing his lunch. When they referred her to the school’s standing policy on outstanding debt, Keown took action on her own, paying off her son’s balance — and every other student’s lunch debt at the high school. Her check totaled around $200 and helped nearly 20 students, but for the frustrated mom, it’s about so much more than just the money. “I realize I didn’t have to do that,” Keown said of her donation. “But I don’t want another kid going through what my son went through.”
Now, Keown is taking it one step further, starting a petition to change what she considers an unfair policy. “I want guidelines set in place for all of the Dowagiac Schools,” she writes on the petition, which has garnered nearly 20,000 signatures since Keown launched it on Monday. “No child should be denied food EVER. Under no circumstances. If there is a case where the child owes more than $10.00 then he needs to be offered a cold sandwich at the very least.”
It’s unclear whether Keown’s petition will change Dowagiac school lunch guidelines as of yet. But her actions are undoubtedly heartwarming — and will hopefully inspire other parents to take action on behalf of their kids in the future.