Parents Threatened With Losing Children Over School Lunch

You can't make this stuff up. NYC is ahead of the curve for once, in that we simply serve lunch to every student who wants it. In at least PA community, they are less enlightened, and that's a gross understatement. They're talking about placing liens on people's homes over lunch money. In fact, they're threatening to take children away from parents for owing lunch money. They're not actually allowed to do that, but they seem to think this threat is a good idea.

In fairness, that makes them better than Donald Trump, who takes children away from their parents out of sheer cruelty, and then charges $800, from people who likely as not haven't got it, to reunite them. Here's the thing, though--being better than Donald Trump is nothing to brag about. It certainly doesn't rule out being morally bankrupt, which this school district most certainly is.

Once, when my daughter was in elementary school, she came home and told me she'd been eating peanut butter sandwiches all week. I asked her why, and she didn't know. I went to the school to find out. I'd given her ten bucks to pay for lunch for the week. The teacher had sent the kids to pay for lunch, and some kid who always paid weekly hadn't done so. She just assumed he did, and let my daughter eat peanut butter all week.

I was a little bit angry. I made a few calls. The school changed their policy and made the teacher record who paid rather than giving her best guess. Later in the year, at some school plant sale or something, the principal handed my daughter ten bucks. I felt pretty good about that, because no one had offered to pay us back. However, the policy of giving kids with no lunch money peanut butter sandwiches beats the hell out of threatening to take your kids away.

This school board needs to be fired. Though they don't quite rise to Trump levels, they are completely unfit to have anything to do with education. Extorting money from poor people by any means necessary may be a good con, but it's not what any kid should be getting in school. Actually, instead of providing tax cuts for people who least need them, our federal government ought to provide free lunch to all kids. I'd argue our kids need it more than our zillionaires.

I don't know what the laws are in PA, but this ought to be a violation. I'd argue that anyone involved in this miserable decision ought to pay a steep fine, at least enough to cover all the student lunch fees, and then spend a few months in jail, or at least cleaning the garbage on the highways.

I don't know how these people sleep at night. If it weren't for Trump and his goons, I'd call them the scum of the earth.