My wife runs a school kitchen, a big school, 2k+ high schoolers and almost 20 staff. Her pay is actually terrible, but the job has good medical insurance and I’m self employed with no benefits so she’s been sticking with it. Collecting debt is part of her job. They never withhold a basic meal (no extras if they have unpaid debt) but that meal gets added to their debt.
They don’t threaten anything legal like in this story, but they will not give you your diploma or transfer your credits if you haven’t paid your debt in full. We’re in Ohio.
Yet another reason why I hate every goddamn billionaire with the fire if a thousand suns.
Just the fact that billionaires even exist shows that our system is fucked.
*firey passion of a thousand suns
*fiery suns of a thousand passions
Eh, not just America sadly. Half the world seems brainwashed into thinking that feeding children is controversial. The BBC did an article the other day about 500,000 extra kids getting them, and it got 9000 comments, split equally between “fair enough” and “but what about my tax money? 😢”
They should give the Libertarian nutcases a large enclave, and all the people who moan about their taxes being spent on other people should be forced to go and live there.
Oh, there’s a pothole on your road? Hope one of the residents can afford to have it fixed. You were burgled? Can you afford to pay the police company to look into it? No streetlights, sorry. That’s a waste. You carry a torch and light your own way. Pensions? Didn’t you save enough?
Stop worrying about the tax bills of billionaires, for fucks sake. They can get by with less.
Just a reminder that the same people who are against free school lunches for children are the ones who stand in front of abortion clinics screaming about how abortion is murder.
There’s no contradiction for these people. All fetuses have a right to life and children should suffer if they don’t have enough money. Shoulda worked harder at the bootstraps factory if they didn’t want to eat shit their entire lives.
They max out at a 4 on Kohlberg’s morality scale, ie the laws are immutable and nothing can change them. The law says that everyone should live and our system is perfect because it’s our system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg’s_stages_of_moral_development
My school held my diploma for 6 months because of $20 worth of lunch debt that turned out to be a computer error.
That was 12 years ago.
Schools using food as a weapon against students is nothing new.
Getting school lunches is so foreign to me, but then again people here in NL just bring home made sandwiches, which are generally cheaper to make than food like in the picture.
At least in the schools I went to when the teature noticed somebody didn’t have lunch with them on a consistent basis they would ask what was wrong and give them food.
Some other kids just kept eating unhealthy food every day because the school was still selling that. Heck in my first highscool they sold candy every thursday or so. It was an interesting time.
As a Swede i think your system in the Netherlands sounds so foreign. When I was in school we always had 2 hot meals to chose between and a 'salad bar’s. All paid for by the tax system. No one should ever be forced to go hungry imo.
Sounds like heaven! in Denmark we have to make our own rugbrød sandwich at home… Every day… From kindergarden until… Well some do it their entire life…
You can buy a hot meal in gymnasium but it is very expensive
In NL most people don’t even eat hot lunches on a regular basis. Even at work people just bring sandwiches in most Dutch companies unless they are internationally focussed.
Nobody should go hungry, but I don’t see the appeal or need for a centralised food system. Pretty sure there is less food waste if you just give your childeren food from home.
It is the same in Denmark…
it is way more convenient and nice to be served a hot meal every day.
But I don’t really understand why people can’t just make a sandwich from home, especially if they will get in legal trouble.
They should do a UBI for kids. I think 30 euros should be enough to cover a montg
if you just give your childeren food from home
Pretty bold to assume all kids have food at home.
Like I said in the original comment you didn’t read the kids who haven’t had food would generally been given food at school
That can easily lead to “othering” those kids as well. Also, many parents who can still give their kids food from home might still struggle to do that at times.
Schools are already monitoring a whole mess of kids at once. Why not just take care of feeding them too? That ensures that, regardless of what happens at home, they have at least one good meal each day.
Probably doesn’t understand the disparity of the home setting of kids in the US
I understand the appeal of bringing a cold lunch, but from a nutritional perspective only few sandwiches really are healthy. Most breads have little to no whole grain part (I remember that ultra fluffy bread from the Netherlands exchange, it was amazing but definitely not nutritious), and at best you can fit in two slices of tomato and cucumber and a salad leaf. The greatest part is the fillers of usually “animal protein” which contain too many saturated fats.
Don’t get me wrong, you can absolutely make a healthy sandwich with whole grain bread, homemade hummus, grated carrot, tomato, salad, cucumber, sprouts, quality cheese or seitan slices… But most people just don’t do that. Most people take light bread with butter or cream cheese and deli meats and cheese on top.
I have been at a congress a couple of years back (I work in biomedical and nutrition science) and one presentation was by someone who gave dietary advice in clinics and reviewed some common tips and guidelines of dietetics. One of them was recommending adding bread as a whole grain source. The caveat was that people would not just eat the whole grain bread (if they were even to choose whole grain instead of white or light bread to begin with), but that - even when you substitute lets say a serving of white noodles with actual whole grain bread - you don’t eat the bread alone. You put toppings on it, butter, deli meats, cheeses, which are all high calorie and not exactly healthy for you. Patients (especially the ones trying to lose weight) ended up increasing their calorie intake and their sat fat and salt intake by adding healthy bread to their diet.
I don’t want to say that a cooked, warm lunch is automatically more healthy than a sandwich - but you have many more options here and more practical ones than with sandwiches. You can add so much more vegetables to it.
Yeah, well, if a cheese sandwich was good enough for my grandparents and parents, it’s good enough for me.
We’re the tallest people in the world and I don’t think it’s humanly possible to be malnourished here, so maybe we’re doing something right :D
You have to get the volkoren (whole grain) bread which is actually nutritious and most Dutch people actually don’t eat it enough. And it is generally considered to be better for you than most lunches people have. Like having Spaghetti for lunch like the stereotype for Italians.
I find it to be really impractical and expensive to eat hot lunches at work. I would skip my daily walk where I eat my sandwiches and I doubt ill be able to warm it up, clean the microwave or whatever I use to heat it and eat it in the span of half an hour. Especially if everybody needs to heat their food.
Every time when I have had good hot lunches (of going outside to a restaurant etc) it would have costed me 15-25 euro excluding drinks, but yeah that is somewhere else I understand that. Another issue is that I generally do not have enough appetite to eat food in the evening.
My sandwiches aren’t the healtiest to start with because I don’t eat margarine which we tradionally put on bread (it’s not even actual butter anymore) and I generally put the same thing on it because well I am not even that much of a fan of sandwiches let alone creating them. I put deli ham on it and sandwichspread.
Maybe I should just bring some leftovers and eat them cold, could do that as well I guess.
Maybe I should just bring some leftovers and eat them cold, could do that as well I guess.
You could absolutely do that, or cook dishes that are meant to be eaten cold to begin with. Onigiri, buddha bowls, gazpacho soup (with some volkoren bread ;) ), a salad with falafel balls, etc. A zucchini-egg-oats-ham-cheese slice from the oven is also a cool afternative, you can cut it up and freeze it and just let it thaw as you need - and eat it with one hand. Bring some baby tomatoes on your walk. Eating a cold lunch doesn’t mean you need to choose between leftover cold spaghetti with meatballs and a sandwich.
I understand the value of taking a walk, but eating while walking is also not exactly the healthiest.
Last but not least - our little conversation here is actually off topic. The question is about school lunches. And while you might like your cold, unhealthy sandwich and a walk (all power to you) - school children who can’t return back to class earlier if they eat faster do absolutely deserve a warm and nutritious lunch. Remember that in the US, a lot of people cannot afford to feed their children at home, let alone with a warm and healthy meal. Maybe a sandwich for lunch is fine if you then have a great breakfast at home and a big dinner, but imagine all you eat in a day is a white bread pb&j sandwich for lunch and then the same for dinner, breakfast skipped. This is the reality for many more people - many more children - than we can imagine. And children move more and they are growing and they have to concentrate at school, they need to be full and nourished.
This is why this is so important. Providing all children with a free or at least dirt cheap meal that is both tasty (as in, accepted by the children’s freakishly picky palate) and nutritious is an incredible challenge, but it is possible. Yet it is treated as an afterthought at best and poor people shaming and punishment at worst. If a child gets a pb&j for dinner and no breakfast, it better have a goddamn delicious huge ass plate of wholegrain maccaroni with vegetables and chicken breast and a low fat joghurt with fruit salad for lunch. And a salad bar. Because salad bars rock. I’d prefer it not to be chicken, but I probably have the only kid that genuinely likes boiled tofu over meat.
You call sandwiches unhealthy while here they are considered healthy. I might look into some other dishes, but I am not the biggest cooking fan.
I rather fix the issue of why parents can’t feed their children cause they probably can’t properly feed themselves than working on fixing an consequence. Which might not even fully fix the issue due to picky eather etc.
Also the waste is a lot more than if you just bring school lunch in a reusable container.
But as long as poverty isn’t fixed it is better for offer school lunches than let the kids get hungry of course, but it will not help push people to end poverty
Not American, but here in Australia there is a growing trend towards supplying some level of food at school, quite a few schools are introducing Breakfast Club to offer food before school, and a lot of schools find they can get better nutrition for students by supplying balanced options to students directly via a variety of programs.
Food and Kids can be quite complicated and my own son can be quite resistant to the idea of even having food in his school bag as his medication supresses appetite and he feels pressured if we make him something as opposed to providing shelf stable packaged foods that won’t spoil if he can’t bring himself to eat.
From what I understand of the situation in the US this is an intersectional issue where it has been identified that:
- Preparing food in bulk is a lot cheaper
- Food can be fresh and thus encourage kids to eat it more readily
- Nutritional outcomes can be targeted
Which is intersecting with:
- America is a capitalist hellscape where no opportunity to profit of anyone, no matter how vulnerable, can be overlooked
- There are multiple levels in the school lunch program where private companies can invade to engage in some rent seeking
- Social pressure can be exerted to make sure families feel obligated to participate no matter how expensive or predatory the program
- Never ever should a poor person be allowed to feel a modicum of support or relief, if that can be achieved by leveraging their children so much the better.
The thing is that something like sandwiches aren’t cheaper to produce in bulk and a lot of the cafeteria’s will have either a fair amount of food left over or they barely make enough for everybody to combat that.
I don’t think the food in US school is really that fresh.
No person should go hungry period, but I rather fix the reason why most go hungry than fix the solution. And I have had mandatory lunches in school and generally there is just a choice between meat, fish or vegaterian and I often find myself picking the least bad option.
Having prepared sandwiches at industrial scales yo would be surprised how much you can scale down costs, bulk purchases can make a suprising difference. I really envy the system that most Japanese schools have in place. They seem to be focussed on the outcomes, not the cost or social engineering. I have talked with some Japanese friends about this and while a few are from wealthy families and attended schools without a formalised school lunch program the majority talk about how it opened their horizons as far as food options, gave them a sense of community, and was just a defining characteristic of their school life.
Yep. Our high school had a cafeteria where you could buy snacks, but none of the schools I went to ever supplied lunches as such. It’s basically the parents and kids responsibility to feed themselves. As it should be.
Maybe Dutch parents (used to be) much more responsible than those elsewhere. 🤷♂️
Why “as it should be?”
I don’t have or want kids, but I want ever child to grow up healtht and food secure. These are humans that can’t work for themselves and have no means to protect themselves from food insecurity, and they will be my younger coworkers, and bankers and brokers and building my roads and and and… I want them to be mentally and physically well.
I don’t understand why our society builds sidewalks and playgrounds and funds schools to teach kids how to be humans, but feeding them is a bridge too far… We already hold them captive in the middle of the day when one of the 3 meals is served anyways…
I agree. Kids should be fed. But that’s not the school’s job. It’s to teach.
The Netherlands has a robust social system. There’s welfare for people without jobs, there’s financial assistance for raising a child, there’s food banks, etc. Etc. And plenty of help getting into these assistance programs.
Basically, there is NO reason for a parent not to be able to feed their child. Even if they have zero money, there’s help. The only thing they (or the kid) needs to do is make some sandwiches to take with them for school lunch. That’s it.
I’m glad you live somewhere where this problem isn’t even phathomable to you.
You can certainly argue that it isn’t the schools job specifically, but it would be the most practical and efficient choice. Kids are all already gathered there at the right time, facilities usually exist or can be added to buildings…
But to say “just pack a sandwich.” … I just wish I lived somewhere where that was it. That THAT was the barrier.
Well then, I sincerely hope the place where you live gets better :-)
Thanks.
What’s NL? Why Americans always write their state names in abbreviations and expect people from other parts of the world to understand?
NL is the ISO standard abbreviation for The Netherlands and considering our history in the world (both good and bad) I assume most people understand where it is from…
Ok, sorry mate. As Americans always does this, I assumed you’re from USA. My mistake. Have a good rest of the day.
Lmao your first hot take is hilarious though. “Why do Americans always do this shit! Oh not American, never mind, sorry for being a cunt.”
Maybe realize were all humans first?
Fair I understand it, I run into the same issue, but tying The Netherlands is pretty annoying especially with the amount I talk about it haha and a lot of people do understand what I am talking about.
Good day to you as well
/s??
I read that as the Netherlands as it’s their standard, international abbreviation
I really like your spelling “teature” but it’s officially spelled teacher.
Because English is silly like that.
My school here in the USA we had school lunch too, it was usually pretty ok, kids also packed lunches the same as your school.
In Germany it was pretty unusual to eat in school at all, you had breakfast at home (7AM-ish), school starts at 8 and finished at 2PM latest, usually 1.15PM. We all went home for lunch afterwards, and that was that.
Same here, I brought my own lunch, sandwiches mostly, all the time I was in school as a kid a long time ago whenever I wasn’t going back home for lunch. I prepared lunches for my own kids all the time they were in school.
Punishing kids for lunch debt is evil, at least give them the right to vote if you are to play that game.
America, the only country where they think they could not be any more selfish.
This is a little different but it sticks out.
My baby brother was born in 91 and when he eventually got into kindergarten one of his teachers flagged him for his speech impediment. He’d pronounce his P’s as B’s.
He was 5 and talked a mile a minute before he was two. He just couldn’t quite get the hang of that one part.
My parents weren’t worried. We were all helping him. My other brother and I were 6 years older than him and we we’re latchkey kids by the time I was 10.
My parents worked second/third jobs and second/third shifts rotating to make everything work for us. We barely saw them both at the same time.
I remember my Ma, and even Pops, being pissed as fuck and our chores and cleaning day was ramped up for a month or two, and all us kids had individual therapy sessions where they grilled us with questions we didn’t understand because the school call CPS on them because they wouldn’t (read: couldn’t) make after school speech therapy work with their schedules and they knew he’d learn on his own eventually anyway. They just made my parents lives that much more stressful in that time.
This was over 30 years ago now and I have my own kids, and bonus kids even! I have my own stories I could tell but this is the absolute worst because I saw how much it stressed out my overworked parents. My brother is a functioning member of society who got over his slight speech impediment within the year, with our help but mostly letting him develop on his own time.
Meanwhile, us kids just considered it a matter of course that we wrap up plates and Tupperware after each meal. One plate for Gertie our nextdoor neighbor and whatever was left went to Jorge’s family two doors down. We also learned how to mow the lawn only so the Grandma and Grandpa Hass, our other next door neighbors wouldn’t have to anymore. They weren’t actual family but they were to us. Jorge’s family got all my and my brothers’ hand-me-down clothes for his younger siblings, too. We didn’t quite understand why at the time. It’s just what you do. But yeah, make a struggling family’s life that much harder with your performative concern.
So it’s too expensive to provide school lunch, but not too expensive to completely take over the care of the children entirely. More and more, I understand what people mean when they say the cruelty is the point. This makes zero goddamned sense.
I want to add something because I want to add a glimmer of positivity. I mean, this is all anecdotal but I’m housing one of my daughter’s friends right now.
I’m still learning her history because I have absolutely zero guardianship over her and I don’t pry because she’s been through so much and she shares when she’s ready. Her mother passed about two years ago and her dad is in the wind. Her grandma has guardianship but treated her as a burden.
I play nice with Grandma so my new daughter stays by me. I’m not sure if CPS was ever called on either her mother or grandmother or if it was just because mother passed but ‘daughter’ has weekly therapy and a social worker who got her into a very decent state university.
She’s about to go visit for a tour and I’m so worried but also excited because she has a full ride from the state for a two or four year depending on what she wants. I’ve looked into the school and it’s pretty great. It’s going to be hard for my ex and I to pull off the same for our daughter.
The state of affairs are abysmal these last few decades but there are still good people trying to do good things. The Man isn’t out to get you if you’re lucky enough to get the right government employee. Or maybe you just have to suffer enough.
I know the young lady I’m talking about deserves this chance and I’m ecstatic that she has the opportunity. It makes me feel a little guilty that I’m going to miss her, but in a good way.
I wish every kid and every parent didn’t have to worry so much about getting into trouble because they’re already struggling. The horrors I’m learning this child has gone through shouldn’t be the bar by which we set as deserving of a higher education.
I have barely anything to offer but even just feeding her and teaching her to cook and do laundry and taxes and set up a bank account makes me some sort of goddess in her eyes and I’d love to take credit but it’s just too tragic to me that a child considers this little bit I have to offer as some sort of gift. What I have to offer as a ‘gift’ is not. It’s what any child should be entitled to. I’m happy that she finally feels comfortable enough to add things she wants to the grocery list without worrying too much that she’s putting me out in some way.
It may not seem like much to you, but to her it’s making a world of difference. I’m reminded of a quote I got from an otherwise kind of silly movie:
“Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children.”
It’s a slightly changed version of a quote from William Thackeray, apparently. Whatever the case, I think it applies here. The gods and goddesses of this child’s life let her down, and you may not think much of yourself or what you do, but you’ve chosen to be a good goddess, and that’s a wonderful thing. You’ve blessed not only the child you’ve taken in, but your own, as well, by showing her how to treat others the right way.
Orphan grinder…
State doesn’t pay for kid’s lunch. If parent can’t afford kid’s lunch, state takes child and places them in a foster home. State pays foster home many many times the cost of lunch to take kid.
Tell me what the goal of this system is so I can call someone else a conspiracy theorist for a change.
May I introduce the Victorian concept of Children in Workhouses.
That’s where you’re heading.
Well that was a fucked up but very interesting read, thanks.
This is EXACTLY what they want. They sell the cute ones (check the protective services website, they have them listed for placement like a weird dating service or pet adoption site). They will prison to pipeline the rest while working them in “skill camps”.
CPS is a dystopian hell. I advocated for a child for a while, they would fuck up absolutely basic things, would not find out about things like hospitalization or legal trouble for weeks. When I brought up several months of basically no mental health care, they insinuated that I might be abusing the child.
They won’t take action on actual abuse. It’s Kafkaesque.
To justify their budget, they must find “clients” to put in their system. Getting clients means finding just the right parent(s) that they can bully, intimidate, and exaggerate charges against. Child services no longer operates in good faith. They won’t even allow you to record their conversations because they are so apt to lie. The foster system is just as bad. Putting people on payroll to take care of kids that no one knows the location of. 23,160 foster kids were reported missing or unaccounted for in 2024. These were just the ones REPORTED. Where is the politician rage over this?
Where is the politician rage over this?
My states DHS has the wrong number for a large county’s police force. They have been leaving voicemails with children’s personal information, as well as preventing cases that are supposed to be reported to the police from actually being reported - because they’re in some random guys voicemail!
I noticed this more than a month ago, have made hundreds of phone calls and emails to state agencies and politicians. They don’t care.
I spent two years as a CASA. I loved that kid. That entire experience crushed me as a human being.
The foster care system is complicit in child trafficking, and the politicians are in on it. I recall a news story where a politician was “helping” pregnant women with visas and trafficking them and the babies.
And for good measure, the vast majority of homeless people were children who aged out of the foster care system. Foster care is a gift that keeps on giving.
Original goal was probably to send kids to Epstein. Idk what current situation is, probably another hidden island that politicans visit.
👉👃
I’m betting it’s a ‘hungry kids yearn for the mines earlier’ sort of thing
Kids having lunch debt is the most American thing I’ve ever seen.
But why oh why aren’t people having kids?!
Isn’t this several years old, or is it happening again?
Or, has it not stopped happening?
The original story i heard the school backed down for 2 reasons. 1 a local millionaire offered to pay the miss $26k and 2 the press was causing a lot of negative attention.
Good
Kids go to public school during lunchtime. Public school feeds the children lunch (something with real nutritional value that we would all want our kids eating). Kids do not pay for this. That’s it. There should be no further discussion here. If you disagree with this I want to put my thumb into your eye socket in the worst way. It’s so fucked up this is even a topic of discussion.
I want to put my thumb into your eye socket
This is unfair. You should want to put both thumbs into both eye sockets.
I agree with that kids should be fed, but what’s wrong with homemade sandwiches? That’s what is the norm in NL and if kids don’t have them theaters notice it and will work on fixing it while given them food.
The shit we had at most schools I went to was well kinda unhealthy crap.
Nothing wrong. Bring it and eat it. But if you’re kid and you don’t, school should feed you. In the US kids are legally required to attend school. Forcing someone to be somewhere and not providing sustenance is not allowed in war or prison, damn well should not be allowed in schools.
They’re the future of our country and society, and legally required to be there, but we won’t feed them.
'cause 'merica you fucking commie.
There are other countries where kids bring their own lunch. We always make sandwiches and a snack for our kids to bring to school.
I do think school-provided lunches are a great idea and if done right, would guarantee every kid equal access to healthy nutrition. Unfortunately we don’t have that in NL, and clearly the powers that be don’t want it in the US either.
But punishing kids for lunch debt is nuts. That’s absolutely a symptom of the US wanting everybody to live in debt.
Wasn’t it last year schools were throwing kid’s bagged lunches away? So then they force the kids to eat a school lunch or starve, then blame the parents. This is just the next illogical step of the grift.
Throwing kids’ lunch away should be illegal. What if s kid has special dietary requirements? But if a school does throw it away, they have an obligation to provide a free lunch that’s at least as good.
It should be illegal to throw someone else’s property away without their permission, right? I mean, it’s basically theft.
Trump’s new spending bill is providing $3.6 trillion tax cut for the richest among us. They already pay only 8% on average, but they own the politicians and are demanding to pay even less.
How are we supposed to pay for that if we don’t rob children of their school lunches?!
Spending less money bombing children in other places would give us more than enough funds, but that helps funnel money to the aforementioned richest among us, so that’s not going to happen.
Yep that’s right, $8 billion in the new bill for Israel to continue massacring children and stealing their ancestral land.
Israel First policy is an American notion I’ll never understand. Israel is the biggest terrorist nation-state in the world right now, nobody commits war crimes and other high crimes against humanity at the rate Israel does. It’s so sad to see them dog walking American leaders every day but here we are.
They need them to breed the other terrorists they like to bomb.
How dare you invest in the future? Our potential future tax base needs to learn how to starve or go into debt - those are the most important lessons in the good old US of fucking A.
Invest in the future? But how will that affect today’s profits?
something with real nutritional value that we would all want our kids eating
As long as you don’t go all Jamie Oliver about it.
CHICKEN NUGGETS ARE DIRTY AND FOR THE POORS
/s
