Is my school the only one that just dealt with this at the end of the year? You just accrued debt and couldn’t pass or get your grades until you paid it off.
It seems stupid to punish the kids for the parents’ mistakes. (And I’m assuming here that their free and reduced price lunch programs would be used if the parent couldn’t actually afford to pay.)
When I saw “Tanstaafl” I thought it would be about something by Robert Heinlein, which where I first saw the term.
In some cases, people deserve to lose their jobs. This is one of them.
I say sack the person who *told *the frontline underling to do this, or who led her to believe this was what should be done. Or who wrote a policy without putting in a provision for such cases.
Around here, at public schools the school lunch is ALL no-charge-to-the-student, period, avoiding such situations. At the religious-based schools I went to, we used the prepurchased-ticket system, with cash if you wanted specialty items, and needs-tested for free lunches.
Completely wrong.
First of all, don’t insult the lunch servers with this “poor, untrained and uneducated” nonsense, ok?
Secondly, it wasn’t the regular lunch workers. If you read the story, you wouldn’t have to make shit up. It was a “Child Nutrition Manager”, aka the Cafeteria Manager, who decided to take away the full lunches after they’d already been given out and substitute the limited meal for kids who don’t pay. Interestingly, other stories say that this sort of thing happens all the time, but on a smaller scale. What seems to have caused the outrage here was that it was done to so many kids at once.
I have no idea whether a “child nutrition manager” (no caps) is cafeteria manager or a lowly server. I’ve worked shitty peon jobs that had “manager” in the title. And everyone whose parents aren’t rich or didn’t support them through college has been poor, untrained and uneducated at some point. There is no shame in it.
There IS shame though in taking away a meal you’ve already given to a kid, and tossing it away. Said person deserves to lose his or her job.
If I read all those articles right (I read several, and I’m not going to go re-read them now), IIRC the “Child Nutrition Manager” was someone a little higher up. Not a “lowly server” nor even the cafeteria manager, but someone from the district level whose job was overseeing the cafeterias and I guess their menus at the schools throughout the district.
Obviously, it’s someone who’s in charge of making sure you don’t have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?
I read the original story, assuming the kids brought some sort of lunch with them, that got thrown out by the ‘manager’. Did I miss something?
Tripler
Apparently that’s now a thing–searching kids lunches for ‘appropriateness’.
That’s not in the text of the story linked to by the OP. It wouldn’t make any sense if the punishment was intended for those who didn’t have any money to pay for food. Got a cite or did you just mis-remember it?
Event Summary;
Kids were given their normal lunches, despite negative balances.
After a fair number had been given their lunches, a person that some articles are saying was the manager for that particular lunch room, and who other articles are saying worked for the district (note these are not mutually exclusive), went around confiscating those lunches, throwing them away, and handing out the limited ‘milk and a piece of fruit’ lunches given to those who don’t have money.
Again, the interesting thing to me is that some articles point out that this sort of thing happens all of the time, just not to this many kids at once. It will be even more interesting to see if this incident changes that, so that the law (or at least rule) is changed to say that you can never take a lunch away from a child once it is in their hands. I would hope that is the eventual outcome.
Given that this sort of thing has happened essentially all the time, I would expect that if termination is decided upon, it will be under the auspices of “You made international news and made us look bad.”
I interpreted it as the handing out of milk and fruit* instead of a full lunch is done regularly for those students without funds to buy a full lunch. I think what landed this in the news is that usually that’s done before the kid checks out with the full lunch and sits down with all her friends to eat.
*Which is probably a much healthier lunch than the full lunch, actually.
The fact that this even got national attention in the first place smacks of blaming external forces for a personal mistake. The parents are all outraged that their snowflakes had an inferior lunch one day, but they’re the ones who let the accounts get low in the first place.
You really think someone should lose their livelihood for making one mistake? Sure it happened to get bad PR, but I’m sure this isn’t the first time this kind of thing ever occurred. I don’t think it’s that big a deal, honestly. The Internet Outrage Machine[sup]TM[/sup] is reacting predictably, but the kids didn’t starve. Even if they’d had to skip lunch entirely, welp. I skipped a few lunches in school when I forgot to brown-bag it on my way out the door and I didn’t have any cash on me. It’s just not that big of a deal.
The parents might not even have realised their accounts were low. Bureaucracy for benefits can be very difficult to navigate.
I agree, though, that “someone should be fired” is wrong. Something went wrong in the chain of command and perhaps there actually is a disciplinary offence there, but who knows.
I want this person fired because it’s clear that she puts money over the wellbeing of the kids she is specifically hired to make sure are given sufficient nutrition. It’s not like these kids can make up the lack of nutrition later, as you are given only a specific lunch every day.
It’s not a single mistake. This is a regular practice. The kids’ parents don’t pay, so the kids are punished by depriving them of food. They are given milk and fruit, which in no way makes up for the nutrition they are lacking.
Yes, going without lunch one day is no big deal. But using that as a punishment for the parents of the kids is. Especially since it likely won’t just be one day. You think the parents who care so little about their kids to keep their lunch account current will care that their kid comes home saying they were hungry?
It’s not Internet rage. Depriving kids of food is a really, really big deal. My school never let it happen intentionally. I learned early on that if I lost my lunch tickets I could go get an extra from the office. Yeah, I also went without sometimes, too, but that was my choice not to go and get a ticket. It was never, ever forced on me.’
I mean, we’re talking about a program that was specifically designed to make sure that kids get fed. That’s why school lunch programs exist. The ones who pay subsidize those who can’t. It’s not like the food wasn’t there and they couldn’t pay for it. These kids are deprived because capitalism means more to this nutritionist than her job of making sure kids are adequately fed.
I’d actually call you the outlier for thinking the whole thing is no big deal. Even the “free market at all costs” people aren’t arguing that this is acceptable.
Fine with me. It should look bad. I don’t understand how they were justifying such actions in the first place. Heck, my lunch ladies would sometimes give out free food because there’s no way to make sure you only get exactly what you need, and it would go bad otherwise.
Hopefully, increased scrutiny will keep them from continuing the practice. Giving kids food and then taking it away is a type of cruelty I don’t do to my dogs.
If the kids had accounts with insufficient balances, then they are not the low income kids on the free or reduced lunch program. They are the ones who, in your words, are supposed to be “subsidizing” the ones who can’t afford it. (Except that isn’t the way the FaRPL program works. It’s tax funded, not school level communism.)
Don’t attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
That’s the way it’s supposed to work. However, I have received 3 emails this year telling me that my grandson has a negative balance and will not be allowed to get lunch and he is on the free lunch program. I asked the school what to do, and was told to ignore the emails since I know that the emails are wrong. :rolleyes:
I know computers/technology makes my life easier…until it doesn’t. 