School Lunch On Layaway?

A Salt Lake City school got national attention last month for refusing to give meals to students with outstanding lunch bills, following similar decisions in Texas and New Jersey. Patricia Montague of the School Nutrition Association calls the rise of lunch debt “a broad and growing national problem”:

School meal programs are self-sustaining and financially independent of a school district’s education budget. However, federal regulations prohibit school meal programs from carrying debt from unpaid meal charges from one school year to the next. So when parents don’t pay the balance, and meal programs are unable to cover the costs, school districts are forced to pick up the tab. As a result, many school meal programs have been forced to institute controversial charge policies governing whether, and what, their school cafeterias will serve to students who are unable to pay for a meal.

Research indicates that an increasing number of children arrive in the cafeteria unable to pay for their meals. A 2012 SNA survey of school meal program directors found that 53 percent of school districts were experiencing an increase in unpaid meal charges. Of those facing the increase, 56 percent anticipated that the accumulated debt from those charges would be greater at the end of the school year compared with that of the previous school year. Thirty-three percent anticipated a significant increase in debt. Some meal programs acquire thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of dollars in debt from unpaid meal charges. New York City’s public schools reportedly incurred $42 million in unpaid meal debt between 2004 and 2011.