Can’t Pay for School Lunch, Kids? Have Fun Starving While The School Throws Your Food Away!

What in the hell is going on in our schools today?

No, I’m not just talking about the atrocity that is common core. All over the country, stories are surfacing of hungry public school children who don’t have enough money to pay for school lunches getting their food seized and thrown in the garbage instead.

That’s right. When a student can’t afford to pay for the government-subsidized tripe our education facilities pass off to our kids as food, or if they are even short a few measly cents in some cases, these children have to stand there hungry and watch in humiliation as the school employees throw their food in the garbage!

The schools aren’t billing the parents and giving the student this food which they are apparently just going to completely waste by tossing it in the trash anyway. Nope. Because that might, you know, make at least a modicum of sense.

Schools all over the nation are instituting “no pay, no food” policies. A handful may at least give a child some milk or a piece of fruit or bread, you know, the kind of meal that really lends itself to high academic achievement.

These aren’t isolated cases, either. Here’s a recap of the most recent honor roll of American public school cafeteria douchebaggery:

• An elementary school in Salt Lake City, Utah reportedly seized between 40 and 50 students’ lunches on pizza day and threw them all in the garbage when the kids got up to the register and couldn’t pay because their account balances were either low or empty. Students all over the cafeteria were broken down in tears. I’m sure that made for a great learning environment.
• Remember the most important meal of the day? A 12-year-old Dickinson, Texas boy’s breakfast was thrown in the trash right in front of him at his middle school because his account was short a whopping .30 cents. The breakfast itself cost $1.25.
• Around 25 students at a Massachusetts middle school were forced to throw out their lunches or refused lunch entirely because their accounts were empty or they could not afford to pay. An employee from the school’s on-site lunch provider reportedly gave an order not to provide lunch to students with overextended credit or empty accounts. At least that employee was later put on leave. “I’m pissed that when there are people in prison who are getting meals, my daughter, an honor student, is going hungry,” one father remarked.
• A New Jersey elementary school threw a 10-year-old autistic boy’s lunch in the trash because of an unpaid account…despite having already done so before. “It’s between the parents and the cafeteria. It’s not between the child and the lunch lady. Let the kids eat their lunch,” the boy’s mother told a local news station.
• The middle and high schools in Old Town, Maine have a “no pay, no food policy” that Superintendent David Walker says students, like the 11-year-old denied food because his mom hadn’t paid his account, should be able to understand. “Students are old enough to take responsibility for their lunches” by middle school age, said Walker. You know, because apparently 11-year-olds can suddenly get jobs in this country to afford their lunch at school.
• Over 40 elementary school students in Kentucky were denied a full lunch during state testing week. One student’s account was short $1.15, which the mother told a news station she paid online as many schools require the night before, but the funds hadn’t been processed by lunch time the next day, so her fourth grader spent all day upset and left school crying at the end of the day. Luckily a good samaritan showed up to that school and donated $56 to pay up all student lunch accounts so no more kids would have to go without a full lunch (which isn’t even that large to begin with in this country) during state tests.
• Worse, apparently students at some schools across the state of Minnesota are actually branded with “Money” or “Lunch” stamps across their hands when they are late on accounts as a message to parents to pay up. Yep, they are actually branding children with the scarlet letter of poverty if they cannot afford their lunch, so the child will have to walk around school for the whole entire rest of their day branded and a walking target for ridicule by other children because they are poor or the parents forgot to put money in their children’s accounts.

These are just a few examples. The list goes on and on.

How it’s a more cost-effective money saver to throw away bought-and-paid-for, prepared food in the garbage so no one eats it at all rather than give it to a hungry child who can’t afford to pay has not ever been fully been explained. In many cases, these policies were put in place long before this rash of stories ever hit mainstream media and public perception.

And the administrators who came up with this brilliant plan are the people in charge of the buildings we send our children to for an education in this country?

Schools already receive a host of food commodities for school lunches from the USDA for free and taxpayer funds to provide students with food — it’s one of the largest federal funding streams doled out to schools in this country each year. The federally funded school lunch program became permanent in 1946 under the National School Lunch Act. It’s already in place.

So arguing that we shouldn’t have to pay to feed school kids is not even the issue here because it’s already happening and has been for some time. Taxpayers pay for a lot of things they don’t want to in America, things like Planned Parenthood, the Obamas’ multi-million dollar Hawaiian Christmas vacations, the $3 billion NSA spy hub in Utah so our government can track all our phone calls and online communications, and all these ridiculous, never ending wars. That’s another list that goes on and on.

The point here is, the food is already there, already cooked, already paid for…and the school is just throwing it away right in front of the hungry child.

If a parent left their child with a babysitter and the babysitter withheld food or failed to feed the kid for hours and hours, that babysitter would be fired. Legally it’s considered neglect in this country. When a parent withholds food from a child for hours and hours, that’s again considered neglect and child protective services will remove a child from their parents’ home and custody for that.

Apparently when a taxpayer-funded, government run public school deliberately starves a child, however, it’s somehow legally permissible?

Parents are compelled to send their children to school with truancy laws as well, unless the child is homeschooled. Parents have wound up in court and jail for failing to do so. That means in some cases parents are being legally forced to send their child to a place where he or she might not get fed (and therefore are left legally unprotected), however, and that’s…a-okay?

On top of that, it’d be illegal to do this to our prisoners, just as the angry father from Massachusetts pointed out above. In fact, our government force fed prisoners being indefinitely detained without trial for terrorism in Guantanamo Bay during Ramadan. But our children get to stand there and watch as their food is yanked away and trashed? Do you see anything wrong with this picture?!

How does any of this make any sense? But hey, I guess when the kids get crappy test scores on state tests because they can’t concentrate on their common core basics long enough to do well because they are hungry, the school can just sob to the state education agencies and U.S. Department of Education that they need more professional development funding to help fix the problem, right? All while conditioning kids to become accustomed to public humiliation and hunger with treatment we don’t even allow our nation’s prisoners to experience.

We’re right on track to building a wonderful society, are we not?