The Other Student Debt: American Children Struggle to Pay for School Meals | Education

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When sisters Hannah and Hailey Hager learned that some of their classmates in Davidson County, North Carolina were having trouble paying for school lunches, they didn’t see that as the problem. of someone else to solve.

Hannah, 12, and Hailey, 14, started selling lemonade on the weekends to help pay for the roughly $35,000 lunch debt that Davidson County schoolchildren owed at the end of the last school year.

“My friend couldn’t buy food at school because she had no money,” Hannah, who has just started sixth grade, told Al Jazeera. “She came up to me in the hallway and said, ‘Hey, Hannah, the school just gave me a paper showing my debt level.'”

“Every time you go to school, what helps you think in class is food, so you don’t think about your hunger and you have energy,” said Hailey, who comes from start eighth grade. “You have to have your lunch.”

To date, the young activist sisters have raised $13,252.17 for 20 schools in Davidson County, with balances from six schools to be cleared, according to their mother, Erin Hager.

” It’s a big problem. We are in the United States and there are children who are hungry, for God’s sake,” Erin Hager told Al Jazeera. “It sounds like an oxymoron.”

Churches and other donors have also taken action and, along with the Hager sisters, have helped reduce the county’s school lunch debt by about half, according to Davidson County Schools Chief Financial Officer Tyler Beck.

The effort is commendable. But for some advocates, the real solution lies not in paying off the school meals debt, but in making school meals free for students.

The Hager sisters successfully raised over $13,000 for 20 schools at their home in Davidson County, North Carolina. [File: Courtesy of Erin Hager/Al Jazeera]

A growing problem

Davidson County is just one example of a growing problem in the United States.

The median amount of unpaid meal debt per school district across the United States has soared 70% over the past six years, according to to the School Nutrition Association (SNA). At the end of the last calendar school year, 75% of school districts reporting to SNA had an outstanding meal debt ranging from $10 to $500,000.

“Our organization has been advocating for universal, free school meals for many years,” Diane Pratt-Heavner, SNA’s director of media relations, told Al Jazeera. “School meals are just as important to children’s success as books, pencils and paper, and hungry children cannot learn. They need to be well fed to be able to concentrate, especially in their afternoon lessons.

Some presidential candidates have also advocated for universal free meals to deal with the crisis. US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont propose year-round free school meals for all children, and Rep. Julian Castro of Texas said he would to expand free breakfast and lunch for all public school students.

The cost of school lunches varies widely depending on where you are in the United States, but on average, school lunch costs $2.48 for elementary schools and $2.74 for high schools nationwide, according to a 2018 SNA study. foundwhile the the average breakfast costs $1.46 for elementary schools and $1.55 for high schools.

The amounts may seem small, but the bills can add up quickly given that there are approximately 180 days in the average school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. A high school student who buys breakfast and lunch can end up paying around $770 a year, a significant sum for many low- and middle-income families in the United States.

To put this into perspective, a recent study by the U.S. Federal Reserve revealed that nearly 40% of U.S. households would struggle to afford an unexpected $400 expense.

We know there are plenty of kids who don’t qualify for free meals, but whose parents are still struggling to make ends meet.

by Janet Poppendieck, author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America

Not covered by guidelines

Under the current guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), only children whose families live at or below 130% of the federal poverty level — set at $33,475 for a family of four for the 2019-20 school year — have right to free school meals.

Children from households with incomes between 130% and 185% of the poverty line — $33,475 to $47,638 for a family of four — are eligible for reduced-price meals. Everyone else has to pay full price.

But those guidelines don’t accurately reflect national needs, says Janet Poppendieck, a professor at the City University of New York and author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America..

USDA income thresholds for subsidized school lunches are not adjusted for differences in the cost of living, which vary widely from country to country.

“We know there are many children who are not eligible for free meals, but whose parents are still struggling to make ends meet,” Poppendieck told Al Jazeera.

And the federal government is not allowed to step in and help. USDA mandated in 2017 that federal funds cannot be used to pay off student meal debt.

This means that the burden of helping children whose families are not eligible for free or reduced-price school meals falls entirely on local districts.

“Schools should look to charitable contributions to cover costs, but when charitable contributions aren’t available or sufficient, they should look to general education funds,” Pratt-Heavner said.

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Hannah and Hailey Hager have pledged to continue selling lemonade until their district’s school lunch debt is paid off [File: Courtesy of Erin Hager/ Al Jazeera]

From “lunch shaming” to free lunch

Left to their own devices, some school districts have resorted to “disgraceful lunch” children who cannot afford their meals by forcing them to wear stickers or eat different foods from their non-indebted peers.

Some school districts have even taken meals out of children’s hands and thrown them away, which “clearly leads to embarrassment and discomfort,” Poppendieck said.

“For schools, having uncollected money is a problem, but putting the onus on the kids seems to me totally contrary to our values ​​and our understanding of what childhood should be,” Poppendieck said. “The most egregious situations are when the meal is confiscated, then because it cannot be eaten after being selected by a student and cannot be returned to supplies, it is discarded.”

The solution, proponents say, is simple: provide free meals to all students. It would eliminate the time and money schools spend processing federal applications for free and reduced meals, tracking meal debt and figuring out who pays what at the cafeteria cash register, Crystal FitzSimons said. , director of the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit organization working to eradicate poverty-related hunger and undernutrition in the United States.

“Offering free meals to all children would solve the problem immediately,” FitzSimons told Al Jazeera. “And we’re seeing more and more schools offering free breakfast and lunch to all students.”

New York City and Boston are among the cities that now offer free breakfast and lunch to all public school students. Poppendieck said she would like to see such measures taken at the federal level and have the federal government foot the bill by taxing higher incomes at higher rates.

And Poppendieck says it’s “encouraging” to see families, children and charities stepping in to pay off student meal debts, she notes “this is a situation where public policy is creating the problem, and I don’t think it’s appropriate to rely on the generosity of individuals and GoFundMe campaigns. I think we have to change our policy”.

Until that happens, Davidson County has the Hager sisters, who have vowed to continue tackling school lunch debt, one lemonade sale at a time.

“It’s not fair that some children can’t do certain things because they don’t have enough money to pay, or that they can’t eat and are hungry because they have a debt,” Hannah said.

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