School officials in Warwick, Rhode Island, decided to crack down on students who had not paid their lunch bills; they announced that any student in arrears would get a cold sandwich, not a hot lunch. The choice was either peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or–for those allergic to peanut butter–sunbutter and jelly sandwiches. The story of “lunch shaming” got national media attention, and money began to pour in to pay the students’ lunch bills. The district quickly reversed course as the story went viral on national news programs, but the chair of the school board worried that children were not learning responsibility when other people paid their bills. A local restaurant owner whose daughter attends the public schools offered $4,000, but the district rejected her offer. Then the offers got bigger. The owner of the Chobani Yogurt company offered nearly $50,000, actor Alex Baldwin and Michael Moore said they would chip in, a CBS current affairs show offered $40,000. Someone in Florida pledged $10,000.
The district is trying to figure out how to accept donations. Maybe they could learn how to accept philanthropy by consulting with charter schools, who have mastered this issue.
Or maybe the district could build into its budget a free breakfast and hot lunch for every child, regardless of economic status, and avoid future embarrassment.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Glad we shamed the school district into sanity!
It’s interesting that this was big news. I worked in a MA district where kids got a cheese sandwich (peanut products were banned). Whether it’s a young child who won’t understand why s/he has a different lunch or an older child who does understand and may feel ashamed, it’s wrong. I had a preschool kid whose parents simply forgot to reload his account. He had anger issues and was violent. I knew he would flip out when he saw others eating pizza. So I bought his lunch and lunch for two other kids whose accounts were empty. My co-workers got angry with me and yelled at me in front of the children because I was “messing up the system.” Appalling. (I now work in Boston Public Schools where there is universal free lunch.)
Finland has universal free breakfast and lunch. Also free medical care. And free higher education. And high taxes to pay for it. And it is the “happiest country on earth.”
Awesome, Annat, that you stepped up there. But this simply should never happen in the richest country on Earth. School breakfast and lunch needs to be “free,” paid for by more steeply progressive taxes.
That story was something of a journalistic screwup. What they describe is normal, standard, everyday practice in school cafeterias across the country — and that’s certainly a story. But it’s not true that this particular school or district was engaging in unique cruel and unusual behavior, so reporting the story that way was an error.
Sometimes the “meal of shame” is a plain cheese sandwich or a bowl of cereal. Some school districts (I heard of one in Orange County, Calif., years ago) make them go hungry. The San Francisco Unified School District gives kids in that situation a full meal, because we activist parents agitated and made that happen. That costs the district a huge amount.
The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) funds school meals for low-income students whose family fills out the meal application. So technically, this policy isn’t starving the poor kids; it’s shaming only the kids whose families can (supposedly) afford to pay for lunch but forgot to put money in the account. But there are low-income students who fall into the cracks and aren’t qualified for NSLP meals: sometimes because their families simply didn’t fill out the application; sometimes because undocumented families are afraid to; and in a super-expensive city like San Francisco, the threshold to qualify for free lunch is way under what it actually costs to live here.
So to be clear, if there weren’t the various cracks that some kids fall into, this would be done to kids whose families CAN afford the meal and just haven’t paid into the account. Even so, shaming the kid is obviously a cruel and out-of-bounds way to handle the situation.
The main thing is that this isn’t some anomalous cruel practice in one locale; it’s standard operating procedure almost everywhere.
Superstar school food blogger Bettina Elias Siegel posted on Facebook that she’ll be writing about this tomorrow — clarifying and exploring the big picture. Here’s her blog: https://www.thelunchtray.com/
Thank you, Caroline, for those insights
I have mixed feelings about this. Obviously the district’s decision is immoral and reprehensible and the reactions of donors is heartening. But I am concerned about the lottery-style funding based on targeted publicity. This is not the way things should be. Meanwhile, children whose situations don’t get press are not getting what they need. Not saying I have the answers (well, I guess I do, as you cite in your example about Finland above), but like so many things in the country, there’s something deeply flawed here.
Yes, and especially when there was a press screwup and it was reported as a unique situation, so donors start making offers; while if the reporters had done enough legwork to learn that this is universal standard practice, the response might be advocacy for a better, more equitable system.
That money should all go into a segment of that school’s budget that only pays for a child’s lunch and is not spent on anything else; we could call it a lunch trust for children.
We had the same cheese sandwich for students whose parents owed the lunch services. We also had a “take me table” where students that were not going eat something like a piece of fruit or some other prepackaged item could place the unwanted item on the table. Students could take what they wanted from the table. Students were very generous with some parents deliberately packing extras for others. Nobody went hungry, and there was no stigma to the “take me table.” The school had a built in sense of social responsibility.
If the school had a built-in sense of social responsibility, they would find a way for all kids to have a meal (not a cheese sandwich) and not rely on the generosity of other kids/families stocking the “take me” table.
One of the few good things I can say about my younger daughter’s year in our local public school is that that was the year the school went to universal free lunch and breakfast. Everybody eats, no one gets shamed, no one has to rely on anyone else’s discards.
In my experience as a school food activist of the past (when my kids were in school and I didn’t have a day job), the schools that can do universal free lunch are the very high-poverty schools, because they’re getting NSLP reimbursement for almost all the meals. Maybe that’s not always true, but in general, the money for the meals has to come out of some other budget otherwise, and that’s not as obvious or easy as it sounds.
Maybe very wealthy public schools also offer free lunches, since they always seem to have money for anything they want, but my guess is that that’s not likely to be a priority for schools serving mostly children of privilege.
I think the NSLP reimbursement for school meals is about $2.70-$2.80 each, with no variation for high-cost-of-living locales like mine (San Francisco).
A childhood friend of mine became the food service manager at a very, very high-end Bay Area private high school (one that had a pretty high profile in the college admissions scandal, just to show HOW rich those folks are). Foods are a la carte in their cafeteria. She told me the kids mostly spent about $15 each per day on lunch + snacks. Just for comparison.
It’s not fiscal responsibility; it’s austerity. It’s from the top. And this country is serving children with cold austerity sandwiches instead of hot meals when their scores on bogus standardized tests are low and when charters and vouchers come to town to drain all the funding. Every Student Succeeds in getting a hot meal in a full service school with experienced teachers — except the perpetual bottom-five percent. It’s been a Race To The Top of the cafeteria line. Last in line gets peanuts, No Child Left without peanuts. Peanut sandwiches are Separate But Equal food.
My poor ELLs, who were about the poorest in the school, never went hungry as they qualified for free lunch and breakfast. I am sure #45 is working on a way to cut them off. The marginal students just above the poverty level were the hardest hit by having to pay for lunch.
Should not shame the children, shame the parents for their inattentiveness!!
Who makes the decision to shame the parents for their ALLEGED inattentiveness?
How many parents of children that live in poverty work more than one job and are not home much because they are working 16 hour days earning poverty wages?
I am talking about the parents mentioned in the following piece from 2013 and it is only getting worse, not better.
“U.S. Low-Income Working Families Increasing”
“Economic security is out of reach for a growing number of working families in the United States, according to a new analysis of 2011 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The number of low-income working families rose from 10.2 million in 2010 to 10.4 million in 2011, representing nearly one-third of all working families.
https://www.prb.org/us-working-poor-families/
Or maybe the district could build into its budget a free breakfast and hot lunch for every child, regardless of economic status, and avoid future embarrassment.
Amen
Once again, I feel the need to add a friendly (and it is friendly!) correction: no need for the word “free” in the above sentence.
“A local restaurant owner whose daughter attends the public schools offered $4,000, but the district rejected her offer. Then the offers got bigger. The owner of the Chobani Yogurt company offered nearly $50,000, actor Alex Baldwin and Michael Moore said they would chip in, a CBS current affairs show offered $40,000. Someone in Florida pledged $10,000.
The district is trying to figure out how to accept donations. Maybe they could learn how to accept philanthropy by consulting with charter schools, who have mastered this issue.”
Isn’t all of that SO lovely?
It’s very weird that I was thinking that that’s what TAXES are supposed to be used for, back in the good old days were taxes were more evenly paid by private citizens and commercial entities for the public commons.
Hmmmmm . . . . How does Europe do it?
Oh right, I remember now. They have TAXES pay for needs like this because everyone pays their fair share relative to the perverted United States, where it’s okay to not adequately feed a hungry child and where the Secretary of Education owns 10 yachts from a system that rigs tax evasion in her and her diabolical husband’s favor.
It comes full circle, doesn’t it! All so easy to view and connect the dots . . . .
I personally am against great white sharks. They don’t deserve ANY hot lunches whatsoever. I say give them something cold, worthless, and non-nutritional to eat. Maybe throw Betsy DeVos overboard into the ocean?
Make sure when Besty the Brainless goes overboard, her ankles are tied to a rope and bleeding raw cow meat is strapped to her body to attract the sharks.
And make sure she will not be drowned. I’d hate it if something happened to her so she couldn’t experience the wonders of being eating, bite by bite, by sharks. It must be an incredible rush when an arm or leg is torn off.
I am so embarrassed by the RICH in this country. They are parasites and there’s a special place in hell for them. With all the food being thrown away, we have young people in school who are “SHAMED” for being poor.
Good one, Ameri-DUH. What a sad country we are. In the meanwhile look at all those campaign contributions going into the coffers of political candidates. SICK.
I don’t think it is just the super-rich in the United States. I think getting rich is like getting Ebola. Once you are invected, the odds are against you.
For most people no matter what country they live in, wealth has a way to change their perception of the world and corrupt them.
I think that is what Lord Acton meant when he said: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
And we know it isn’t easy to have power without wealth. The more wealth one has, the more power they buy until they are absolutely corrupt beyond reason.
I sometimes think it would be nice to have a few hundred million or a billion dollars and then I wonder how that money would corrupt me. My conclusion is maybe I’m better off without that much money so I wouldn’t be tempted.