Gotcha. Yep, that’d be pretty awful, and, one hopes, criminal.
I’d do the right thing.
The linked article and others mentioned that some schools in that district qualify for free lunch for all students. This has to do with the percentage of students whose family income falls below a certain threshold. The school in question did not qualify this year. It may be because some parents did not understand how to fill out the forms and they counted other federal aid as income. The articles weren’t really clear on how the lunch program worked, but I got the impression that any family could apply for and receive free lunches for their kids based on need — and once a certain percentage of kids at the school qualified, then everyone got free lunch.
There was some insinuation that some of the parents ( I suspect it was the 4 parents with the $450+ debt) were refusing to pay as a form of protest against the policy. Apparently the school in question will get free lunches next year.
Sending that letter was the wrong thing to do. It weaponized the department of social services. But I’m not convinced that these parents are people that genuinely couldn’t scrape up lunch money for their kids. It’s sound like they may have been mad because some upper-middle class kid on the wrong side of town gets free lunch, and their kids don’t.
I’m not exactly trusting the nutrition department’s take on things at this point.
I think there are three different issues here:
- Is the policy on who should get free lunches, and how the bureaucracy re: those lunches works, appropriate? I don’t have enough information, but from what little I have they sound jacked.
- Are some parents falling down on the job? I don’t have enough information, but sure, there’s always gonna be parents who flake on shit like this, and they shouldn’t do it. If they’re protesting in some way, they sure sound like assholes, the kind of assholes that collections agencies were invented for.
- Was the letter appropriate? OH HELL NO.
Incompetent bureaucracy, flakey parents–welcome to civilization, y’all. That’s just how things work. But threatening parents like this? I don’t know if it’s criminal, but I damn sure hope the DA is combing the lawbooks figuring how whether it’s indictable.
It’s not - even if I hadn’t seen that a lawyer was involved in drafting the letter, I would have known one was. Because it’s an example of what I call “lying by telling the truth”. From the NYT story:
Assuming that the children were sent to school with neither money nor food- every line is true. Sending the child with neither money nor food* is failing to provide proper nutrition, and parents can* end up in dependency court for neglecting a child by not providing adequate food. And if the parents are taken to court the result may be foster care. But the impression that the letter sought to give, that there was a good chance kids would end up in foster care if the parents didn’t pay is not true. There is no chance they will end up in foster care just for an unpaid lunch bill.
And the district wouldn't be making those reports in good faith. Remember how I said the parents are failing to provide the kids with proper nutrition if they sent the kids to school with neither food nor money? You notice I didn't say anything about unpaid bills- because that doesn't matter. If district feels the parents are neglectful for providing neither meals nor money for the kids to buy lunch, then the district should set standards for when to report to CPS- whether the parents paid the bill or not. And if the district decides they weren't actually neglectful because the parents know the school wouldn't let the kid go hungry- then they aren't neglectful, even if the parents stiff the school on the bill.
Oh and about those parents with the $450 bills- I’m sure they are people who are not eligible doing this as a protest. Because in my experience, people who are eligible for free lunch, etc generally fill out the paperwork and don’t want to run up bills that will be sent to a collection agency
You’re likely right–which means they should merely be dismissed, not charged.
I am far less sure. The federal forms for free/reduced lunch are a little bonkers (e.g., you have to enter the income for everyone who lives in the house, including infants), and a parent who is, for example, illiterate, may have real trouble getting them filled out. I’ve had to keep after parents before to get them turned in, and this is tricky to do, because by law I’m not allowed to know who’s been approved by the program, or to keep records of who’s turned the form in. But I can see who’s getting bills sent home by the cafeteria, and I can follow up then. If a teacher isn’t following up, or if the parent is phobic about paperwork or something, I can easily imagine the form not getting filled out.
You’re right- when I revised I left something out. Which was that people who are eligible but have trouble filling out the forms might find something to send with the kid for lunch (even if it’s not much), or tell the kid to skip lunch or basically do anything else but tell the kid to get lunch every day resulting in a $400 something bill. Because if you’re eligible for free lunch, you’re never going to be able to pay that bill- and even being sent to a collection agency will be disastrous. But your experience is more relevant than mine, so if you say it’s possible that those with the $450 bills might have been eligible, I’ll accept it.
I mean, slacking off and getting sent to collections isn’t a great idea, but if you’ve got more than 1,000 people living in poverty, it’s pretty plausible that 4 of them are making less than stellar financial decisions. There could easily be 4 people who are just despairing, who already have so many collections agencies coming after them that they don’t give a shit about another one.
I’m not convinced that’s what’s going on–just think it’s plausible that this isn’t a protest.
According to one of the stories I read about this, Several schools on that area have such a high percentage of families below the poverty level that they qualify for a program that gives free lunches to everyone without without asking for income information. That’s the kind of area that this school district is in and yet they pull this stunt threatening poor kids’ families for what reason?
I’ve had some experience with the foster system where I live (New York City). Quite a bit, in fact.
You apparently have no idea how easy it is to take the children of poor people away from them. Without a court hearing. Yes, a court hearing is necessary to terminate parental rights, but short of that? A caseworker’s word will do it.
It’s not an empty threat. And it certainly wouldn’t have felt like an empty threat to those targeted by that threat.
You’re right that the threat wouldn’t have felt empty to those targeted- but although you are correct that caseworkers in NYC can remove children without a court hearing, it’s not true that there is no court involvement until a termination of parental rights. When children are removed without a court order, the child protective agency must file a petition in family court the next business day. I certainly won’t say it’s impossible for a NYC caseworker to remove a child over an unpaid lunch bill - but I have enough experience with the CPS system in NYC ( including working for it for eight years) to say it absolutely isn’t policy and a judge is no more going to remove a child because the parent has an unpaid lunch bill that he or she would remove the child because the parent owes the supermarket money for a bounced check.
The only part of that threat that might not have been empty was that the school district may have actually planned to make reports to CPS about the unpaid lunch bills. Whether CPS would accept* those reports for investigation is another story.
- Yes, CPS must investigate reports of abuse or neglect - but typically, they only must accept and investigate reports that would constitute abuse or neglect if the allegations were true. So when a woman tries to report that her granddaughter’s mother puts the kid’s hair in braids rather that a more elaborate style ( true story) , CPS does not have to accept and investigate that report.
In my area, many schools provide free* breakfast and lunch to all students, because it’s one of the easiest ways to improve the schools’ test scores. It turns out children learn significantly better when they’ve eaten sufficient and nutritious food.
*Some schools ask parents to pay, but it’s like the list of supplies students are supposed to bring to school. There’s no penalty for not doing so.
My kids could purchase extras on their lunch accounts (which I had to pre-fund). I think that if their money ran out, they would not have been able to get lunch; there may have been a “your parents forgot to pay” peanut butter sandwich or something on offer.
I’d calculate out x months of lunch at y bucks a day, and send in a check for x*y dollars. When my son said he was running low, just a month or so into a 2-month prepay period, I questioned him, and he admitted he’d been getting goodies as well as lunch. After that, when I paid, I put a notation on the check saying “lunches only”, so he couldn’t do that any more.
So, there’s no way he could have gotten 450 bucks into hock to the school district.
The message from that school district is absurd on sooooo many levels.
- 1,000 families, 20,000 in arrears: that’s 20 bucks a family.
- 4 of those families owe 450 apiece. 4 x 450 - 1800. So that means the other 996 families owe a total of 200 dollars between them.
- You contact a family by phone LONG before the arrears get over a hundred dollars. And you help them apply for free lunch if needed.
- No judge in the world would take kids away from a family for such an insane reason.
$20,000 - $1,800 = not $200
No, my understanding is that the school in question does not have a “free lunch for all” program, but a traditional free lunch for qualified families program. It is some of the families in the district that aren’t “poor enough” for the program, that feel like the school should have a “free for all” program, so they aren’t paying for their kids lunches, like all of the families in the neighboring districts with “free for all”.
The families that were threatened, were not the poor, but those that weren’t poor enough.
The WVW School Board has apologized for the letter and will accept Mr. Carmichael’s donation as payment for all outstanding lunch debts.
Way to go Wyoming Valley West (Pa.) School District!
Todd Carmichael, you totally fucking rock!
Well duh.
I was a math major, can’t ya tell!!
So corrected math: 996 families owe a total of 18,200 between them. That’s less than 20 dollars per family.
Now, there have been plenty of times where I’d have paid the authorities a LOT more than that if they’d remove my kids 
but beyond absurd to provoke this kind of mis-action from the school district.