The Anti-Spirit of Christmas

According to news reports, last week food service worker Dalene Bowden was placed on leave after giving a free lunch to a hungry 12-year old student with no money. Reportedly, students are given an $11 charge limit, after which they are still provided something to eat like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but not any of the main entrees or other regular food items. Parents are notified when the $11 limit is reached.Obviously Dalene failed to follow policy, but I don't think it's right to put a minimum wage lunch lady on the front lines of taking a student's tray away and dumping it (school policy, according to Dalene). If reports are accurate, who could look at the senselessness of the policy (the food is going to be thrown away anyway) and deny a hungry student that food. Not me, and not most people I would reckon.I hope the school reinstates Dalene and changes their policy. Let an administrator deal with lunch charge balances greater than $11 - don't make it the lunch lady's responsibility.Articles: --Percy

Wow, I guess nothing should surprise me anymore, but this makes me wish I could find whoever fired her and pee in their cheerios.This meets my definition of crappy government.

You can back off the vigilante self-righteous indignation. This is an ongoing problem with schools racking up debt over unpaid school lunches for which there are no clear guidelines. Yes, lousy government but much bigger than any single case and it's not exactly gone unnoticed. Cafeteria Incident Renews Debate on School Lunch Debt

Thanks for your thoughts, but I think I'll keep it.A nation that spends $Trillions on defense and corporate welfare can afford to feed hungry kids, without you or politicians or bureaucrats bitching about it.If you read the article, you would see that the food was going to be thrown out so why not let the kid eat it and why take it out on a worker who is earning poverty wages.

Yeah, I would agree except for your self-righteous self-congratulatory moral certainty which is just as disgusting. These people are squeezed between their consciences and the accounting department which is breathing down their necks and justifies that sort of crazy wasteful solution to the problem. Write a letter to your congresspersons, that would be more productive. Take the realities into account before you do and then offer constructive suggestions.

But let us note the truly amazing consistency, even at Christmastime. Scrooge would be proud!--Percy

Yes, the irony is inescapable.

According to the article, righteous indignation is the correct answer. The school district in question had a policy on how to handle the situation and the policy was not followed. The correct answer here is to be more aggressive with parents in collecting the debt and not to embarrass the kids while wasting the food. What interest does that serve?

quote:

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The action was a violation of the district’s procedures, district leaders told the school board this month. Some of the children’s parents weren’t previously notified that they had negative balances, and some weren’t given enough time to remedy the situation before workers took action.

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Workers will never take a student’s meal away again, said district spokesman Jason Olsen.

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I'd like to see public schools offer free breakfast and lunch to all students. The return on investment would be enormous. Ditto all early childhood medical care and vaccinations (coordinated by schools--who else?).We spend billions later because we fail so many children when we could do the most good.

We all know the correct moral answer to this. The question is why are the schools in this position in the first place? I don't think this is the only case where a food worker's job is on the line for serving an unpaid-for lunch to a hungry child. It shouldn't be up to these workers. There's a bigger problem going on here.ABE: this is a problem all over the country as I understand it. Each school handles it differently. Im sure lots of kids get the second-rate sandwich solution when they can't pay for the hot lunch, and lots of workers are tempted to give them the hot lunch anyway. Maybe some do and get away with it. Somebody probably just decided to make an issue of this one for Christmas. And probably lunches do get thrown out when they can't be paid for too. Focusing on this single case misses the big picture.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes. Every poster here seems to agree that the issue should not be left up to the workers. Yet in at least one case a worker has been fired for giving away lunches. The article actually describes a good chunk of the schools problem, which is not collecting money from parents.The school is supposed to administer the problem by collecting money, or applying for free lunch and in particular the district policy eliminates the solution that the school employed, namely throwing lunches in the trash and forcing the lunch lady or lunch dude to make that call.I'm not sure what it is about Tanypteryx response that irks you so badly.

Aaand Faith condemns self-righteous indignation. Which is like the Pacific Ocean condemning water.

Well, I don't know what you mean by self-righteous self-congratulatory, but I can understand your disgust at my moral certainty that hungry children should not be political targets.And I can understand your disgust at my moral certainty that hungry children should not be made to suffer as lesson to their parents for the character flaw of poverty.And I can understand your disgust at my moral certainty that minimum wage workers should be made scapegoats because funding has been cut from federal, state, county and district education budgets to fund tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and corporations. Funny you should say that because it is something I have done for many years. On top of that, I also donate time as a mentor and money, food and time to fight childhood hunger.I get it Faith, Happy Holidays.ABE: Not PC enough for you, huh?Edited by Tanypteryx, : No reason given.

EvC- You wanna see Anti-Christmas!? This is a problem of >policy< being judged at the >individual< level.It is compounded by the policy-makers refusing to stand by their decisions and instead throwing the newbs under the bus to account for its shortcomings.So we've got a 12 year old kid, whose parent(s) can't afford to feed, so the state is stepping in and fucking it up.Then instead of looking more towards personal/individual responsibility, like more towards the parents and less towards the school, the proverbial you looks back to the failing system for a performance increase that can make things work.Then you people see shit go viral and make a big stink out of it and demand a political solution.You could invite people to donate $75 to a lunch program for a $100 deduction in their property taxes and get more food to hungry kids than you could paying the Policy-Makers to try to figure that shit out for you.It's too bad that nobody cares enough to get off their ass.You might need them PMs, right?, but when they fail to do their jobs, you don't go to social media, which this is, and complain about it, you go knock on their door and bitch to their face in cursive.If you won't do that, then it doesn't really matter to you.I guess that the line is drawn depending on the knowledge and intention of the student.The checkout cashier is, actually. the arbiter of whether or not you did actually pay, so the arguments against that don't seem too pertinent.Anyways, I banged this out via touchscreen, so there could be "fat-finger" issues.

I'm not sure why "you people" leap to the conclusion that anyone who bitches on social media about policies or policy failures has spent their moral impetus and does nothing else. It's a straw man argument, at best, and irrelevant in any case. It fails the Universal Test: you can throw it at anyone, regardless of fact or circumstance. That's an insult, not an argument.Also, social media-driven outrage can be socially powerful. I don't why you dismiss it as self-indulgently useless.Since most school districts receive the majority of their funding from local property taxes, your solution effectively reduces funding to the school.The problem arises because of the economic inequality created by high level policies. It won't be solved by draining school coffers with tax breaks.