
Shaming Children So Parents Will Pay the School Lunch Bill - DiabloD3
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/well/family/lunch-shaming-children-parents-school-bills.html
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afandian
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.

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glubGlub
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.

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afandian
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.

~~~
dismantlethesun
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.

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FrozenVoid
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/](http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/18/news/europe-farmers-russia/)

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atroyn
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.

~~~
sandworm101
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.

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panzer_wyrm
_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.

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hvidgaard
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.

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WalterSear
Because schools can't pay their basic costs.

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burfog
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.

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joshontheweb
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.

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

~~~
joshontheweb
I can get behind this!

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vanjoe
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.

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pimmen89
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?

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

~~~
Animats
Yes, everyone pictured in that article is obese.

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mschuster91
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...

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chrisbennet
_#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...](https://mobile.twitter.com/gselevator/status/233183548029427713?lang=en)

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infosample
Is lunch free in schools outside the United States?

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teekert
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 :)

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Underqualified
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.

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dominotw
make it free

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dsfyu404ed
x2. Meals cost pennies compared to the trivial BS schools waste money on.

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abakker
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.

~~~
panzer_wyrm
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

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

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

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pimmen89
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.

