What is "Lunch Shaming" Team
Tackling this topic involved breaking it into several phases. The most important stage was outlining our goals. Our goals are simply to explore lunch shaming in many different ways, but most importantly understand it. Researching lunch shaming will help us grasp how it affects the kids in the schools. Hopefully once we fully understand this topic, we will find a correlation between policy and lunch shaming. If schools are not following policies, typically lunch shaming is in play. Stay tuned for updates on our page!
Below you will find links to websites we have came across in regards to lunch shaming.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/02/unpaid-school-lunch-bills/460509/
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/well/family/lunch-shaming-children-parents-school-bills.html
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https://www.americanbar.org/groups/young_lawyers/publications/tyl/topics/access-to-edu
cation/incentives-behind-lunch-shaming/
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Week One Update
Lunch Shaming and Lunch Debt Collection
Lunch shaming is the act of intentionally embarrassing students who do not have the means to buy lunch or receive discounted lunches at school in order to get parents to pay off the lunch debt. Through our research from various news sources and our research from school districts policies in northwest Indiana we have found which schools are the worst offenders of lunch shaming. This problem is not just local, but nationwide, with many incidents being reported of students receiving lesser lunches (brown bag lunches), students meals being thrown away after they try to purchase a meal and do not have sufficient funds or in some extreme cases students who receive discounted lunch prices are forced to sit in completely different cafeterias. Although lunching shaming has been made illegal by federal law and schools are being forced to develop written policies on how to handle students who do not have sufficient funds for lunch, many of these policies can still be considered lunch shaming.
The effects of lunch shaming could have lasting mental effects on the children. When the school pulls a lunch out of a child’s hands and throws it away, depending on the age, the child does not understand the concept that they do not have lunch money but instead believe they did something wrong. Since the peers also witness the lunch being thrown away this could also lead to bullying and fighting, simply because a child is being forced to attend school where they then force the child to purchase a lunch.
There are still many children and families who are unable to pay for lunch debt no matter what means of embarrassment the schools like to force upon their students, leaving schools with massive amounts of debt at the end of the year from a program that is intended to be self-sustaining. It has been estimated the 75% of schools in America end up having a negative balance from their lunch programs at the end of the year. Some school districts have allowed these debts to follow the students from school year to school year, in hopes that the family might come into a position where they can eventually pay it off, or creating an even larger problem if the family continuously can’t pay year to year. Some school districts have gone as far as turning over student’s lunch debt to debt collectors, putting parents into even worse scenarios just to feed their child while they get an education.
Ideally through this project we will be able to get schools to see what is wrong about how they handle unpaid lunches and change their policies for the better.