Shaming Children So Parents Will Pay the School Lunch Bill | Hacker News Reader

Shaming Children So Parents Will Pay the School Lunch Bill

nytimes.com

34 pointsDiabloD357 comments

Aside from the whys are wherefores of the situation, the thing I find the most disturbing is that people who set these policies and do things like this:

> staff taking debt notices to class

> when the cashier discovered she had an unpaid food bill from last year, the tray of pizza, cucumber slices, an apple and chocolate milk was thrown in the trash

Are allowed anywhere near children. I know it's nothing new, and in many countries we're beyond school staff being enabled by the state to physically abuse children (at least by a couple of decades in the UK), but it seems like we still turn a blind eye to emotional and psychological abuse. It's one of the things that petrifies me about potentially having children at some point.

> It shows how lasting these experiences can be.

Given the general chaos of any single school, and the amount of "normal" discipline applied across all students in aggregate, it's probably incredibly difficult for bystanders to notice and distinguish types of discipline, and the underlying motives behind disciplinary actions throughout the day.

Schools are noisy places. It's partly a signal-to-noise and triage problem.

Kids fighting wjth each other. Kids disrupting class. Long quiet noiseless periods during tests. Fixed attention while movies are shown in class. Noisy cafeterias, amid rushed, scheduled lunches. Gym class as a more general hell. During the pace of everything else, it probably just blows by, while other more chaotic events grab attention.

To the individual child, it's all-consuming. To the reader, each experience collected with similar accounts reads as deliberate child starvation. To bystanders in the moment, there's probably a moment of temporary confusion, and then it's ignored.

Kids should pretty much eat for free, especially at public schools, but in general too. It doesn't change the fact that healthy food remains expensive, and that kids will try to eat junk food as much as possible, but the last thing anyone wants to hear is kids being deprived of food for petty reasons.

It probably rings in the mind as less urgent in the moment, when there are no apparent signs of malnutrition visibly evident. Not as much the Dickensian orphanage of the imagination. In the moment, the situation probably strikes a person as the usual scolding ever-present throughout any school.

That's kind of what I mean. The kind of person who will put a child's lunch in the bin, even (especially?) if they are in a rush, is not the kind of person I think should be in the school environment.

Ah is it their lunch if they haven paid fo it? Also I think you may be going a bit far with the schools as sanctuary angle. Schools are imperfect places and seeking to shield children from all possible stress only leads to raising adults who cannot take any stress.

So basically there is some policy like "Throw the lunch into the trash" despite it being paid for by school? i.e. school pays for lunch, but denies it to student and throws it into trash. Its some deranged enforcement of artificial scarcity(like food being destroyed by farmers to prop up high prices, below article). http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/18/news/europe-farmers-russia/

There's a point at which you have to wonder how wealthy the U.S actually is, if it can't even feed school children at no cost to their parents.

At some point it starts to resemble DPRK propaganda.

The country is wealthy. The people are not. Add it all up and the average american pays a fairly high amount of tax. They just dont get much of the basics the rest of the western world expects.

It's all in the distribution.

There is no free lunch!

Priorities.

But when the cashier discovered she had an unpaid food bill from last year, the tray of pizza, cucumber slices, an apple and chocolate milk was thrown in the trash.

So we leave a kid hungry, we throw the food. An we bear even more costs. Also - don't want to live on this planet anymore.

For the price of a single textbook you could probably feed a child for an year on bulk prices.

I don't understand why food isn't considered a basic cost of school. They are a few things more boring that a day old lunch pack, so when you have several hundred children to feed, make some proper food. It's not even all that expensive when you're at that scale.

Because schools can't pay their basic costs.

Just give up.

If the day were shorter, students could make it through the day without eating. The loss of hours can be partially compensated by changing the school year from 180 days to 240 days. The time would be better-used because long hours make people tired of thinking, and because long vacations cause students to forget. (the long summer sets students back by at least a month) Shorter days would even save money on buildings, because there could be an extra shift, with students going to school at different times.

Lunch causes huge logistics problems for schools. People all want to eat at the same time. That means the facility has to accommodate a large portion of the school. The better schools might pay for a cafeteria that holds everybody, which is wasteful. The crummy schools will have 4 or more shifts, meaning that some people eat "lunch" soon after they arrive and others eat it right before they go home. There usually isn't much time to eat; it can be 20 minutes for a fast-growing teen or inefficient first grader.

You'll never get people to agree on a tolerable lunch. Some people won't eat this, and some people won't eat that, and spending the money to deliver a decent experience is just not going to happen, and all of that conflicts with obsolete-when-written nutritional mandates.

Nobody is washing hands. If they were, they wouldn't be able to keep their hands clean due to doorknobs and chairs and so on. Disease spreads during lunch; this causes real harm. Nobody is brushing teeth, but some students have braces.

Enough is enough. School lunch is a disaster and we aren't going to fix it. We should just admit that.

I think that this point of view ignores the fact that a big under acknowledged purpose for public school is daycare. The school day needs to be long enough to give the parents time to go to work.

Not sure what the solution is here but I don't think shortening the day will work due to this.

End the long work day. Higher pay, fewer hours.

I can get behind this!

School lunch is not really a problem for many countries in the world.

Turns out that in order to feed kids we need to contribute a bit more than $2 a meal, but if we were actually interested in solving the problem we could invest in it and just give all the kids free lunches, just like how we give them free classes.

This would have the added benefit of helping out poorer families who might not have the time/money to always give their children the highest quality food.

One thing you forgot to consider is why the school lunch program is in place at all. It's for those kids from poorer backgrounds who might not receive a meal that day if it wasn't for this program.

What about days without school? It sounds like the poor kids just go hungry. Summer vacation means no food.

What about the kids from families with higher standards? They are being forced to go hungry, eat garbage served by the school, or eat a lunch that is neither refrigerated nor heated.

School lunch is a terrible way to feed the poor. If we're going to do that, provide old-style food stamps or just have the postal service drop off food. Do it for everybody who doesn't opt out.

> What about days without school? It sounds like the poor kids just go hungry. Summer vacation means no food.

Yeah, this is actually a problem. Which is why the Summer Food Service Program exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Food_Service_Program

Unfortunately, kids living in places with a local government unwilling to jump to offer this program (which is reimbursed by the federal government) don't have the opportunity. There are a lot of places in America where local government is incompetent and/or sadistic. (See also: Medicaid expansion.)

> What about the kids from families with higher standards? They are being forced to go hungry, eat garbage served by the school, or eat a lunch that is neither refrigerated nor heated.

Oh noes! Unrefrigerated, unheated lunches! How can a human possibly survive?! Tip: if you need your lunch at a thermal gradient to the ambient, try an icepack and insulated bag and/or a thermos.

> School lunch is a terrible way to feed the poor. If we're going to do that, provide old-style food stamps or just have the postal service drop off food. Do it for everybody who doesn't opt out.

There are lots of problems with school lunches. Even as a grade school kid in the 80's, I knew there was something deeply wrong with being served lunch from a steam tray in front of a kitchen that never appeared to be actually used - my school building dated from a time when lunch was actually prepared on site from scratch, but by the time i was in school almost everything was coming from a box out of the deep freeze.

However, interrupt the current program without replacement nutrition in place and you're going to disrupt the lives and educations of millions. Hungry kids don't learn well (or behave in a way conducive to others around them learning.)

PS - I now live in Holland and my kids' school serves no lunch. They have to bring their own - unrefrigerated, un-heated. They manage. ( look wistfully at the school lunches served in France, and think the system here says a lot about Dutch food culture or lack thereof.) But poverty here is nothing like what I left behind in the US.

Interesting the same has been said about Norwegian food culture, where the kids and parents bring basically a sandwich for lunch. The one I heard was that since the kids will only get the food their parents prepare they are less likely to try new things as adults and since there is a culture of not eating prepared meals at work as adults either I guess the problem continues.

Food culture is hard to measure, school lunches are not, I guess there are other objective measures one could use.

Problem? It's not a problem aside from possibly spoiled food and the misery of cold food. Prepared food is grey mystery slop make from corn and soy. It sounds like Norwegian kids learn how to prepare their own food, a useful skill. They also get to have something of their choice.

I did that in the USA. I normally took a drink, fruit, some nuts or chocolate, and two large meat sandwiches. Converting for you metric people... each sandwich might contain a slice of frozen eye-of-round (lean beef) about 8 mm thick and 10 cm diameter, in something like a hamburger bun. A larger version would have each sandwich being a small loaf of bread (a baguette?) about 25 cm by 8 cm, with turkey perhaps 6 mm thick. I'm sure this blows past the Calorie limits we now have in the USA, but I needed it.

School lunch works, but yes when there is no school (or other types of daycare) it does get very hard to get food for the whole family. So it is not the solution to poverty but it does give kids a greater chance at learning wether they are poor or rich.

What's up with kids buying lunches at school? At my school everyone brought lunches with them. Never had any drama that I can remember.

Wouldn't it be nice if schools were funded enough to provide every child with a full stomach, which is very helpful when you're trying to learn something, and the adults training to become soldiers would have to pay for their own meals instead?

Or, why not pay for them both with taxes? How in the hell can you expect a child to learn while hungry?

That child has not been hungry in a while. A little hunger can do you a world of favour.

Yes, everyone pictured in that article is obese.

As for the "Why are they doing this?" or "how is this possible?": in the US, the way of thinking "it's the poor's fault for being poor, and they need to be shamed for being poor so that they do something to not be poor anymore" seems quite entrenched in the society.

The US is in for an even nastier surprise once all those low-skill-demand jobs like transportation are going to be automated away...

#1: "I never give money to homeless people. I can't reward failure in good conscience." -gselevator [1]

[1]https://mobile.twitter.com/gselevator/status/233183548029427...

Is lunch free in schools outside the United States?

Not in the Netherlands, most older kids (>12) bring a lunch box, usually filled with 4 slices of bread with cheese, meat, "hagelslag" or peanut butter (we call it peanut cheese and it is almost only peanuts). Children until 12 often eat at home during the afternoon although that is rapidly changing. Many children now spend lunch time at school, I think the cost is ~1 euro for some slices of bread with topping as mentioned before, they are helped by volunteer parents.

My 4y/o brings a box to school with 1 piece of fruit (some bring a cookie/oat bar or something but the school encourages fruit) and a bottle of water which is eaten around 10:15 I believe. I think this is only for young children.

By the way, if a kid forgets his or her fruit they make it point to share, I like that policy. Also I hear from colleagues more and more schools are switching to water only to battle weight increase in children, although this leads to some discussion :)

Edit: see below, the Netherlands is waking up I guess :)

In Belgium it's pretty much the same. Except that it's usually a cookie and a piece of fruit they bring (morning and afternoon snack).

Some schools (kindergarten, primary and secondary) do offer the possibility to buy lunches. But those are quite expensive (more than $2, for 4y olds in my kids' previous school) and not very healthy, since at that scale, cost of food matters a lot.

In Portugal, school lunches are subsidized (it's currently $1.6 per meal), but poor families pay only 50%, or zero if their income is low enough. So it sounds similar to the US.

On the other hand, there's no lunch bill, as kids have to purchase the lunch tickets upfront. I'm actually not sure what happens if the kid says he has no money; I'm pretty sure my classmates would be too embarrassed to do so. The few times one of them didn't have money, we either knew beforehand (and pooled money ourselves) or the kid just went hungry.

In the Netherlands lunch is usually sandwiches (with cold cheese) that children being themselves. A proper meal follows at 1730 at home. Some schools do school milk or school fruit, but usually it's bring your own. In high school cafeterias exist but do not come near what I see that US/UK schools feed their kids in not very nutritional food. Schools do not last all day, so most kids eat some more after school before going to sports or other hobbies. Many smaller kids go to after school care when both parent work.

In Australia, we provide lunches for our kids to take to school with them. Most schools have a 'tuckshop' where kids can buy treats (icecream, chips) by paying cash on the spot, or parents can order and pay for meals (typically online) beforehand. But that's usually on occasion as a treat and not a regular, daily, lunch provision.

In Sweden it's illegal to charge parents for anything as a school. We can do bake sales and such to fund a field trip for example (and if the money isn't raised, they save what was raised and push back the event until next time), but the school cannot base it's budget on parents paying or students paying for things.

Yes it is (at least in France, Sweden and Finland), and it is much, much better than the stuff the US kids are fed.

In India, government run schools offer free mid-day meals, as an incentive to attend.

> Others argue that school meals should be offered free to all children, regardless of income, as is the case in Sweden and Brazil.

make it free

The fact that children in this country (and really anywhere) suffer from food insecurity is appalling.

Agreed. No child should ever go hungry. We also need more public awareness / education about making healthy decisions when it comes to purchasing food.

x2. Meals cost pennies compared to the trivial BS schools waste money on.

Cough cough...smartboards.

I installed around 50 of those in a 2 week period about 7 years ago. They were very expensive, and extremely poor products. They did not effectively do any of what they advertised to a competent level. However, the school sounded modern to the PTA when they said they were buying them.

A child learns better if itis hungry, crying from humiliation and desperate. Smartboards are cheap necessities, whereas a chunk of slow cooked cheap cut of meat and some lettuce, tomatoes and carrots are opulent luxury.

It is not as if research has shown that nutrition in those first years is extremely important. Who wants more of those pesky tall, healthy kids with properly developed brains and internal organs. /s

TBF that one's internal organs seem bountiful. Perhaps too bountiful.

Obese kids feel hunger too. And her obesity is even better reason to have access to nutritional food at least once per day.

So give the students fresh, healthy, nutritional food for free and then you can rightfully blame the parents for giving the kid junk. Pointing fingers does nothing, offer an alternative and let the other side shoot it down and you can honestly say you've tried.

Obesity can be caused by eating too much, but it can also be caused just by eating too many carbohydrates, the chief ingredient in our cheapest foods.

Thats a good point, I'm appalled that if they feel compelled to crack down on delinquent bill payers to the point they resort to these measures but can't look into other ways to save money.

What are their priorities in life?

Increasing bureaucracy and administration. Almost all of the extra money in increased college tuition in the last has been absorbed by the administrative part and increased amenities for the students.

Very much agreed. We lived in a poorer neighborhood a few years back and my child's kindergarten had free breakfast for all (through title 1 funding). I think it did a lot of good.

No, eliminate meal programs, cafeterias and food workers in schools.

Parents are responsible for the child's nutrition. If the parents don't provide, the school should report it to the relevant authorities (CPS, etc.).

Let schools teach: money allocated for education should be spent educating students, not feeding them.

What's the endgame here? OK, so the parents can't afford food. The kids go to school, and the school notices the kid doesn't have food. Then the parents are arrested and put in a taxpayer-paid prison. The kids are separated from their parents and put into taxpayer-paid foster home. Now the parents are miserable because they lost their kids, the kids are miserable because they don't have parents, and the taxpayers are miserable because they have to pay for your new imprisonment program.

You've come up with an expensive plan that makes everyone miserable.

Nonsense.

If the parents can't afford to feed their children then the children may be put into foster homes with parents who can properly take care of them.

Since only a few parents are (criminally) unable to feed their children, their problems are solved at minimal cost. Other students are not affected by misdirected funds paid to institutional food service vendors, school cafeteria services paid the lowest bid to feed school children instead of educating them.

Your bleeding heart shows:

"he kids are separated from their parents " - what kids wants to live with parents that won't feed them? Ans. Only abused kids.

"the parents are miserable because they lost their kids" - Hell, no. They're likely drug addicts, don't care about their kids, or are incapable of doing so. You're doing them a favor.

"taxpayers are miserable because they have to pay for your new imprisonment program" - You needn't imprison the parents; merely put their kids in decent homes.

My plan is less expensive by orders of magnitude than existing "solutions": it provides appropriate care for the few problematic kids w/o paying millions for institutional cafeterias, food workers, food refrigeration and storage, union dues and unnecessary meals for millions of kids. Money intended for education is spent on education instead of ham sandwiches and cheetos.

With the risk of being snarky, I think the endgame is to make people more productive by using the stick. I.e coercing parents into working harder by threatening to humiliate their child.

I don't think it will work out that well, though.

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