There must be more to this story. It is very bizarre.
In Idaho, a student told a school lunch lady that she was hungry but didn’t have money to buy lunch. The cafeteria worker gave her a free hot lunch.
In response, she received a letter of termination that called out her “theft of school district property and inaccurate transactions when ordering, receiving and serving food,” reports the Idaho State Journal.
In response to public outrage, the district offered to rehire the worker. She said she will have to think about it. She thought the district would find some other pretext to fire her.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This lunch lady is a true hero in my book. We need more people like her!
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And she is wise – she knows they will be looking for something else to fire her on.
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If I were in that position I would have given the kid a lunch, but then I would have paid for it. The food is not hers to give. Imagine a situation where cafeteria workers are just giving food away. Some one has to pay for it. In the decades I spent teaching, I and many teachers have given lunch money to certain kids or just bought a lunch and gave it to them. I think she should be rehired, but then given a reprimand and everyone should be told how to handle such a situation.
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Read the article. She tried to pay for it herself. Wasn’t allowed to do so.
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BTW, according to an article in Salon, the woman says she was told the proper procedure in cases like this is to take the tray away from the kid and dump it. Are you saying that’s really what she should have done?
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OK, I hadn’t read the article closely enough. But she could have done what I wrote, no?
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Dienne:
Both your comments are spot on.
Although I can’t be sure (since it is not mentioned), the lunch lady didn’t apologize for doing the right thing. Good for her!
😀
Given the time of year, the first sentence of the last paragraph was heartening: “A petition pressing the district to rehire Bowden had some 78,000 supporters as of Thursday morning.”
Apparently not everyone buys into a fundamental principal of rheephorm: let no good deed go unpunished.
😎
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prenestino – again, read the article. She Tried. To. Pay. For. The. Food. She wasn’t allowed to.
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Yes, imagine a situation where all children are fed and none go hungry and we all pay our fair share to ensure that happens.
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I paid for students’ lunches for years because I refused to make any child in my care have to forego a hot lunch and have to eat a dry, government cheese sandwich with a piece of old fruit.
Just think. If all those 20 families that control the majority of the wealth in this country let go of just a tiny fraction of a percent of their wealth we could feed every child in the world and provide them medical care to boot. We could even provide care for ALS patients like Vivian Connell in the posting above this one.
Tell me again why capitalism is so great?
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I forgot to add that for over 20 years I’ve watched cafeteria workers throw perfectly good food and milk away because, by law, it can’t be given to other children. Makes no sense when 1 out of 4 children in this country is living in poverty and experiencing hunger. Shame on us!
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This lunch lady should have realized that philanthropy is only for people like Gates, Broad, and the Waltons, and she has no business meddling in it unless she intended to use it to close her school or get it privatized.
Was she out of her lunch-giving mind?
RIght, Tim? Right, Virginiasgp? Right, Raj? C’mon. Jump in! I need some support here.
How dare she . . .
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But it wasn’t philanthropy on her part because it wasn’t hers. I am in favor of seeing that kids get their lunch. I will give away my own lunch or money for lunch. What if I took your lunch when your back was turned and gave it to a kid? ( This is just an academic question)
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Prenestino,
I would be very angry, but I would not fire you or punish you. I would seek to understand the motivation and try to solve the larger problem by critically analyzing the bigger picture.
That’s what critical thinkers do. If I only think of “Me”, which is fine for the short term, I do not address the problem of “We”. A big cause of our ills in the USA is that we don’t assess problems through a “We” lens.
Remind me to tell you about a bus driver who took my lunch one time in public mass transit . . . .
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Robert – I agree, she should not have been fired. I’m sure she and I are like minded people. As are you and I. In my career I was touched by how many students, some times years later, returned to me the lunch money I had advanced them. But it was my money , not some one else.
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PLEASE TELLME ABOUT THE BUS DRIVER
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Robert Rendo ABCD
You are using my name in vain. Just for that here is my take. You can take it and %^&%& it.
“I am assuming that the school is a public school and they were enforcing the rigid rules set up by democratically elected school board, just like the Nazis.”
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Merry Christmas to you too, Raj . . .
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Nino,
I was taking a bus to work and left me container of organic chicken and salad on the bus. My wife sometime makes my lunch. Upon discovery the next day, I asked the driver, with whom for some time I became a conversation buddy, confessed that he took my food and consumed it. He was crapping in his pants when he told me and begged me not to report him to the bus company. He apologized.
I ended up taking a long twisted bus ride to the bus depot the next day to retrieve the plastic BPA container (was not even rinsed, let alone washed). I was able to successfully get the container.
I did tell the bus driver the next day that I was disappointed but certainly not angry and that I did NOT consider him to be a thief. I was actually relieved that someone consumed what was a very upscale and expensive, organic, healthy lunch, and that it was better to be eaten by another human than to let spoil and be thrown out.
No charges or complaints were levied, just gratitude and an act of random impulsivity on his behalf coupled with random kindness on mine.
The district employing this woman should have taken the same attitude. We live in a disgusting, punitive, individualistic, capitalist society. We have people in Georgia being arrested for not paying medical debts, we have shootings galore in shopping malls and places of worship; we have police shooting at unarmed youth, we have. . . .
The list can go on, but I am on a rare holiday right now and choose to put some very temporary blinders on.
Happy holidays to you, Nino de Prophetis . . . .
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Easy solution. Make lunches free. We do not charge kids to breathe air (yet). Make Gates pay for it.
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YES! Make lunches free! But the right wingers will never allow that. They will all scream “COMMUNISM”
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Just saw this on Yahoo—says posted an hour ago, so a bit of an update—
Link: https://gma.yahoo.com/idaho-lunch-lady-fired-giving-free-meal-student-173135017–abc-news-topstories.html#
[excerpts]
An Idaho lunch lady who said she was fired for giving a free meal to a hungry student lacking money to pay is now being offered her job back, according to the school district.
…
“I was a lunch lady at Irving Middle School,” Bowden, 51, explained on a GoFundMe page she set up for herself. “I was placed on unpaid leave Tuesday after I gave a free lunch to a 12-year-old student who didn’t have money to pay for her hot lunch …. what do you do when the kid tells you that they’re hungry, and they don’t have any money? I handed her the tray.”
According to the apparent notice of termination Bowden posted to Facebook, she was fired due to “theft-stealing [the] school district or another’s property and inaccurate transactions when ordering, receiving and serving food.” …
Bowden posted a public status to Facebook today saying she has “yet to get a phone call” from the school district about getting her job back. She asked for the public’s “input regarding my job” and added that she felt she would be “walking on eggshells with the school district” if she accepted the offer.
“Nothing is going to be the same,” she wrote. “What do I do the next time a kid is hungry? I feed just to get terminated? Please give me your input.”
[excerpts]
Go lunch lady!
😎
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“Ironically, Bowden said she later found out the girl was within her $11 limit and could have charged the meal. But the girl didn’t know what her balance was and was too embarrassed and afraid to ask.”
http://www.idahostatejournal.com/members/school-cafeteria-worker-faces-dismissal-for-giving-student-free-lunch/article_a5518baf-686c-5b3a-ac12-8168fcabebba.html
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My father was a hungry child who had no bootstraps, let alone boots. It was his teachers who fed him, clothed him, and then called social services. My father grew up in the Salvation Army Orphanage. His father and mother died when he was in the primary grades. There’s more to this story, but the fact that teachers SAVED him, I am forever grateful. My father LOVED teachers. He RESPECTED teachers. He knew who saved him — his teachers.
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To prenestino
I fully agree that you said: “”Some one has to pay for it.””
Here is the article reported: “Bowden says she offered to pay for the $1.70 lunch, but her supervisor wouldn’t accept her money.”
And here the school district confirms:
“”The release suggested the termination wasn’t specifically because of the free meal (the Pocatello/Chubbuck School District “has not ever taken negative employment action against any food service worker due to a singular event of this nature”)””
According to this article, I can conclude that this supervisor is related to certain management in school district and this supervisor did not like the lunch lady. Therefore, this supervisor seized an opportunity to fire a lunch lady.
Therefore, the positive result is to set up a lunch lady and fire her very soon after rehiring her to save their image and to prove to public that management is always right.
Karma will fall on the supervisor sooner and later and I hope that the supervisor will learn his or her lesson. Keep up doing good deeds, lunch lady. You will reap the inner happiness. Back2basic
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