“Beginning this fall, Wyoming Valley West students will get free meals because the district now qualifies under federal guidelines.”
Thinking about this, sending the letters may have been a requirement for qualification showing that all avenues of communication and collection were done to bring the delinquent accounts up to the date.
And while the content of the letters was harsh, it may be a CYA requirement detailing the POSSIBLE outcome. Ignorance of the law, “I didn’t know that!” rarely stands up in a court of law, but sometimes "I wasn’t told that!’ may. The vast majority of the people owing money would never get a visit from CPS, but the four owing the $450 may as it may lead to questioning if the parent(s) can’t afford to pay $450 accumulated over time, what other household necessities may not be furnished.
As I stated in the other thread. The people that weren’t paying for their kids lunches weren’t the “poor” people in the community. Those meeting the eligibility for free lunch were already not being charged. This school district was located in an area where adjacent school districts had met the eligibility for “free lunch for all” regardless of the parents income eligibility. It appears that many of the parents in the Wyoming Valley school district that didn’t meet the criteria for free lunch, didn’t appreciate that their neighbors in adjacent districts who were similar to them got free lunch when they didn’t. So they were not paying potentially out of protest.
Typically for a district to be eligible for “free lunch for all” the % of people in the community must be substantially high enough that a significant portion of the families would be eligible for free lunch under the normal program, that just giving “free lunch” to all students reduces the administrative costs of testing for eligibility to cover the free lunches for the remainder of the kids.
[QUOTE=Joey P I would think threatening collections would be the last resort. Maybe not letting the kids re-enroll (I have no idea how that would work) would be a last resort. Threatening to have the children removed from their houses is pretty awful…over less than a hundred dollars.[/QUOTE]
Unless I’m seriously mistaken, this isn’t a single school, these are multiple public schools within the Wyoming School District. I’m not sure if you’re from the U.S., but in the U.S. students attending public schools generally don’t have a choice of which school they go to. If they’re within a certain geographic sector, they go to the school for that district. Just because the teachers and curriculum may be better in a neighboring district has no bearing on where your children are assigned.* If your child is receiving free lunch, it’s highly unlikely you could afford to send them to a private school.
*There are possibilities for individual district exemptions and in some areas, in addition to desegregation, some students are given exemptions to allow them to receive a higher level of public education than they would receive in their district.
If either of these are the case, then this trainwreck is still on the school admins for not communicating well enough. It would have been trivial for them to send out a letter saying that they are in the process of trying to get free lunch for all, and forewarn them that they’ll be getting some harsh letters in the mail, but it’s simply a formality.
Yes, I’m in the US and my kid is in public school. I know this isn’t the case everywhere, but where I happen to be located she could have attended a handful of different schools, just due to the fact that we have a few of them grouped somewhat close together, but they’re all in the same district.
Last year, I moved her to a different district. I/we still live in the same place, but her mother lives in the next city over (and my kid is there half the time).
It’s also not unheard of to use a relative’s address to get your kid into a different district. It may not be on the up and up, but I’d certainly be exploring that option if this was happening to my kid.
I don’t think that could happen easily for privacy reasons. I believe that privacy laws &/or school district policies would prevent the school district from disclosing who owes how much, or even who owes at all to a private third-party individual.
He could make a public announcement that any parent that contacts him will have a check cut on their behalf but what percentage of the parents in that district would miss a news story that isn’t specifically sent to them?
Minor point, but it is harder on the bookkeeper who would now need to reconcile one large payment against many accounts vs. the normal practice of each payment is a 1:1 relationship (here a check for Billy’s account, here’s one for Suzie’s account, & one for Johnny’s account.) In the grand scheme of things, I’d take one large check to wipe out a bunch of small debts, but then again, in the grand scheme of things I wouldn’t have authorized that letter to be sent out in the first place.
I don’t follow this at all. So being $450 in arrears on a bill implies that your child is not getting essentials? As was said above, the children did eat, it is just that their parents failed to pay the bills. I don’t see how this is functionally different from putting groceries on a credit card and defaulting on the credit card payment. It would be absurd to suggest a CPS investigation for every parent behind on any loan.
That would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it? You tell the feds out of one side of your mouth that you are leaning as hard as you can on the parents to pay, let the feds get a copy of the letter where you outline your rope-a-dope strategy by saying please pay up, but I don’t mean it, I’m just screwing with the feds?
All this being said, I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but to me it is borderline criminal to threaten parents in this way. Even if the kid missed every lunch, how is it the school board’s business how my children eat? For his whole life, my grandfather never ate lunch. Always said that it made him too sleepy in the afternoon.
He would get up before work, my grandmother would make him a feast, he would work all day without eating a lunch, and come home to another feast for dinner. Was he starving? Should the people at his workplace have worried that he was unable to afford food?
I understand that there are neglected kids out there and we should be observant, but threats like the guy made are out of line. As was said, the kids did eat. Was he equally worried about kids who did not buy any school lunch? Did the school inspect the children who didn’t purchase lunch for a lunch box and/or its contents?
In the middle of writing a letter, yes a person can say impolite or improper things he shouldn’t or wouldn’t have otherwise said. But this is a threat of governmental action; one that he knew or should have known was complete horseshit. He should lose his job over it.