When Vincent Montoya-Armanios was younger, he was merely attempting to obtain lunch. However, he was pulled aside by a school staff member between the tray line and the table, who instructed him to “speak to the manager.” Before allowing him to eat, the manager, a school official, questioned him about why he lacked money. This took place in Pennsylvania. The 2010s. Not in the midst of the Great Depression. Not in some far-off historical period of deliberate brutality. the previous ten years.
Long after you’ve finished reading it, that story remains in your stomach. It’s also not an anomaly. Currently, over 1.5 million students in America have school lunch debt; this amounts to approximately $262 million in unpaid meal balances nationwide. Meal debts are recorded in the books of more than 75% of schools. Since 2017, the cost of a school lunch has almost doubled, with some districts charging as much as $5. Five dollars. That adds up quickly for a child whose family makes just above the federal poverty threshold.
The federal eligibility threshold for free lunches hardly keeps up with the state of the economy. For the 2022–2023 school year, a family of four had to make less than $36,075 per year to be eligible for free meals. When you consider how many working families fall just above that threshold and are still unable to make ends meet at the end of the month, that may seem like a safety net. Up to 25% of students who experience food insecurity reside in households that are not eligible for any kind of aid. They are completely absent from the program, which was created to assist.
This system functions with a subtle humiliation built in. Since schools are not allowed to write off meal debt using federal reimbursement funds, they rely on corporate donors, parent-teacher associations, and local charities to make up the difference. Sometimes grocery chains intervene. Businesses write checks. For a news cycle, people are happy about it. Then, since nothing structural has changed, the debt starts to build up once more. It’s the type of “fix” that doesn’t solve anything and necessitates endless repetition.
When Tolulope Olaniyan was in seventh grade in North Carolina, she was informed by school personnel that she was not allowed to eat the hot meal while standing in line with her peers. Instead, she would have to accept the cold sandwich. To avoid the embarrassment, she began skipping lunch. Even so, she was forced to observe from the cafeteria by the school administration. When she thought back on that year, she said she didn’t know how she managed to survive, frequently going hours without eating and holding on because she knew there might be food when she got home.
Taylor, a lead cook at an elementary school in Indianapolis who requested anonymity out of concern for her job, observes which children are removed from the hot meal line. She observes the sadness on their faces. She said that Black children from working-class families, whose parents work two or three jobs, make up the majority of the students she talks to about negative balances. Every shift, the data confirms what she observes. Debt from school lunches is not distributed equally. Students of color, working-class communities, and children who already have the least margin for error are all more affected.
It’s possible that some legislators sincerely think the current patchwork of means-testing and charity is sufficient. Another possibility is that they just don’t want to pay much attention to who is failing. Congress completely suspended the income requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic. Free meals were given to every student. Less than two-tenths of one percent of federal spending in 2022 was spent on the program, which cost roughly $11 billion annually. In June of that year, Republicans put an end to it. Some states took action to close the gap; since then, legislation funding universal free school meals has been passed in California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Maine. The majority of states have not.
Philando Castile was well-known in his school community as the cafeteria supervisor who surreptitiously used his own paycheck to settle students’ meal debts. He is best known nationally as the man who was killed during a traffic stop in Minnesota in 2016. His mother gave $8,000 to erase lunch balances at a nearby high school after his passing. It is worthwhile to accept that educators and cafeteria employees are using their personal income to support a dysfunctional public system. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that those closest to hunger in these schools frequently lack the resources necessary to address it, yet they persist in their efforts.
A group of activists in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, accomplished something that initially seemed improbable: they put pressure on a nearby school district to simply waive its outstanding lunch debt. The Bristol Borough School District completely erased $15,000 in student debt from its records after nine months of meetings, a public debt assembly, opinion pieces, and board meetings. The board president subsequently acknowledged that the matter had become “lost in the pile” until it was brought up directly. That the $262 million national debt may continue in large part because the appropriate people haven’t yet been sufficiently uncomfortable is both encouraging and somewhat concerning.
Publicly funded universal free school lunches are not a radical concept. It’s a decision about policy. Textbooks are not paid for by kids. To board the school bus, they do not swipe a card. For those aspects of public education, there is no income threshold. Right now, the only pertinent question is why lunch is different and who stands to gain from maintaining that distinction.
