Children whose parents fail to pay for school lunches are being served cold cheese sandwiches under a policy instituted by the Albuquerque Public Schools. The alternative meals go to children “whose parents are supposed to be able to pay for some or all of their regular meals but fail to pick up the tab,” the New York Times reports.
Such policies have become a necessity for schools seeking to keep budgets in the black while ensuring children don’t go hungry. School districts including those in Chula Vista, Calif.; Hillsborough County, Fla.; and Lynnwood, Wash.; have also taken to serving cheese sandwiches to children with delinquent lunch accounts.
The policy has sharply divided the community. Critics say the cheese sandwiches punish children whose parents can’t afford to pay. “Others have flooded talk radio shows thanking the district for imposing a policy that commands parental responsibility,” the Times reports.
“This is one of those cases where you wish school districts wouldn’t do it,” says one editorial, “but you understand why they have to.”
The question I had after reading the article is why it is taking so long to process the applications for free/subsidized meals that the kids are running up a tab large enough to trigger the cheese sandwich meals?
My own school does something similar. In my experience, however, those students whose parents “couldn’t afford” $1 for lunch are never seen without $200 sneakers, cell phones, and iPods. As in many issues in these children’s lives, the problem lies not in being without the means, but being without the priorities.
Pardon me, but in what world are kids stigmatized for having “only” a cheese sandwich, fruit, and milk for lunch? that’s actually a pretty ideal lunch for a kid.
I have mostly stayed out of the bloody Cheese Sandwich Battles (always interesting, the topics that draw the ire and fire). But–#1)I really likes the title of your blog–it made me laugh out loud. A #2) most of the folks commenting here and elsewhere have missed the point. Schools cannot say “well, sorry, kiddo–no lunch for you today because your parent is careless, or the social stigma will haunt you, or the paperwork is overwhelming, or the nutritional value of your regular lunch is nil blah blah blah”
When kids don’t each lunch, it impacts the purpose of schooling: learning. You can either not feed them, on principle, or feed them cheese sandwiches, on a different set of principles–but no matter how you look at it, you have to feed hungry kids or after a certain amount of time, they don’t learn.
I love the title of this post as well. It’s very clever. I don’t think you can really blame the kids in this case. The school has to do what it has to do to feed the kids with the lack of funding the state and federal government provides and the lack of public support. It’s a disgusting thing the schools are doing but if the parents of the children do not want to take responsibility for their own children’s lunch and decide to buy them expensive clothes and electronics then the school is forced to use drastic measures like this. I hope you keep up with this and let us all know how it works out. Thanks for the interesting post.
Paul: What the schools are doing is not disgusting; what the parents are doing/not doing is disgusting. In the age of birth control, if people don’t want to take care of their kids, don’t have them. I agree with Obiwan: letting kids have expensive clothes/goodies and cheating the lunch program (subsidized by people who pay taxes) is grossly irresponsible.