Who Will Pay For All Those School Lunches?

Garth Johnston

Published Feb 9, 2011

Modified Feb 9, 2011

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Garth Johnston

Published Feb 9, 2011

Modified Feb 9, 2011

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The latest place for cash-strapped public schools to squeeze out every last penny? School lunches. After the first three months of school those famously hard-to-swallow meals were the source of a $2.5 million hole in the Department of Education's budget, and now school principals are being forced to put pressure on parents to pay up for their kid's grub.

In an attempt to keep its budgets in check the Department of Education has been telling principals that they had until February 16 to get their kids to pay up—or the debt would come out of their school budgets. Yesterday, after serious principal push back, that date was postponed indefinitely, but the issue still remains. As of last month 1,043 out of roughly 1,600 schools in the system had lunch balances due.

The Federal Government subsidizes school lunches (in 2009 it spent $9.8 billion on them) but that only goes so far. In New York City a kid can get a hot meal for $1.50 at full cost, but food is also available for a reduced-price of a quarter (if a child's family of four has an income of $40,793 or less) or free (if their family of four has an income of $28,665 or less). Which means school principals are now being put in the awkward position of playing debt collector over amounts as little as 50 cents.

“We give them little pieces of paper saying, ‘This week you owe $5, $3, 50 cents,’” one principal told the Times, “but as soon as we collect it from one parent, there’s another who’s falling behind.” The schools with the most lunch payments due were I.S. 145 in Jackson Heights ($25,598); P.S. 276 in Canarsie ($21,907); and P.S. 24 in Riverdale ($20,222).

It could be worse though. Some other districts, facing the same issue, have resorted to drastic measures including serving kids who haven't paid up cold sandwiches and milk, or only letting the kids eat as many fruits and vegetables as they want. Until the law was changed to stop them, some school districts in Louisiana simply wouldn't feed kids whose parents were in arrears.

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school lunches

Garth Johnston

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