With the back-to-school August rush sweeping the nation, millions of K-12 students are heading back to classes. Unfortunately, many of them will have to endure hunger and embarrassment when lunchtime hits.
When children, for any reason, run out of money on their student lunch accounts, their hot lunch gets replaced with a substitute akin to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a fruit cup. In the past few years, the term “lunch shaming” has been used by many for this lunch-debt policy.
Lunch shaming is an antiquated school lunch-debt practice still alive in many schools across the nation. This must end.
Until June of this year, even the Monroe County Community School Corporation practiced it in Bloomington. However, after a series of moving, emotional testimonies delivered at an MCCSC school board meeting, the school board decided to change the controversial policy.
Other counties need to follow Monroe County's decision and change their school lunch-debt policies away from ones that involve shaming children. Lunch-shaming policies put an unnecessary burden on children for something entirely out of their control.
Elementary school children are not responsible for their finances and, therefore, should not endure the stigma that arises from being denied food in front of their peers.
At the MCCSC school board meeting, people who had been lunch shamed in the past explained that they would go as far as skipping lunch entirely to avoid the embarrassment caused by the lunch-debt practice. Skipping lunch is highly detrimental to both children’s overall health and their ability to learn effectively in school; however, many school lunch policies are written to perpetuate it.
Some argue schools should not be responsible for a child’s lunch if the child’s guardians do not pay the balance. While these people have a point, the children should not suffer for events out of their control.
Alternative lunch-debt policies – ones that do not involve wasting hot lunches and shaming kids into compelling parents to pay the bills – do exist and need to become more commonplace in America. For example, schools can be more lenient and understanding toward families struggling to pay lunch debts and inform them of the opportunities to receive free or reduced lunches through the National School Lunch Program.
Though imperfect, this is just one way for schools to recoup the costs often feared if lunch shaming policies are reversed.
I encourage everyone to look into their local school district’s lunch practices. Many may be surprised, since these policies often go unnoticed by the general public. Nearly half of all school districts in the United States have lunch-debt policies that use shaming to move parents to pay bills. These policies must change.
sareynol@indiana.edu
