<p>I’m a bit silly I guess. DON’T TOUCH MY KID. Other than that, gee, what’s wrong with a minimum wage part-time no benefits cafeteria worker treating my kid like a side of beef? A teacher would be fired for stamping kids hands as some kind of identification.</p>
<p>My kid’s public schools use either a six digit code which brings up the kid’s picture, or they have had fingerprint scanners as well. You cannot tell who has money in their account or who is on free lunch. If you know the cafeteria workers like my kids do, they are never cut off. The cheese sandwich or pb&j (the school waffles on whether to give pb&j, but it is back - no more soy butter!) costs the EXACT same to the parent as a regular full lunch. My son’s only issue is that if he owes, and he doesn’t assure them that I paid up (he texts me), he won’t get double or triple lunch like any athlete needs. </p>
<p>IMHO, if the kid gets free lunch, FEED HIM or HER. Feed him double lunch if he wants or needs it. Feed her triple lunch if she wants or needs it. These are INDIGENT kids, and sometimes they aren’t getting breakfast or a decent dinner. My dad had to steal food when he was growing up. You don’t get it unless you’ve been in that situation, that we owe it to kids who can’t afford lunch to feed them, not ration them.</p>
<p>Who they should stamp is the parents who are on the School Board and wrangle free lunches for their kids, despite working for the district and pulling in over $75,000 per year. Preferably across the face.</p>
<p>Wow. This story has been very misunderstood. It’s also only one side in school district battle so you can bet there’s a whole lot more going on. </p>
<p>Again, stamp my kids anytime. Not an issue.</p>
<p>Yes, but maybe it is an issue for your kids. Or for someone else’s kids. There’s only so much that a parent should be able to consent to on a child’s behalf.</p>
<p>You’re making an awful lot of assumptions, rhandco. Those “minimum wage part-time no benefits” cafeteria workers you disparage? I don’t know about the ones at this school, but the lunch folks at the schools I have worked at are wonderful, warm, caring people with good manners. A number of them could easily have more eduction than you do. </p>
<p>I can’t even wrap my head around your allegation that school board members “wrangle” free lunch for their kids, and thus should be “stamped across the face.” And I’d sure like to get the $75K a year I should have gotten as a board member. Somehow, they must have forgotten to mail my check.</p>
<p>Flossy, did you make your daughter pay for her own school lunches?</p>
<p>I am opposed to anything that establishes an “us vs. them” division, especially with regard to issues kids have no control over (i.e., their parents’ finances). It is not a child’s fault his or her parents can’t afford school lunches, any more than having money for expensive food from home or unlimited purchases from the cafeteria is something they can take credit for.</p>
<p>Sally, no of course not! And, I thought this was elementary school so she didn’t have a job. lol. But, this really happened. And, there was no stigma to free lunch. Maybe, there is somewhere but no schools my kids attended. My oldest D went to a magnet high school that was 90% free lunch. And guess where most of them were at lunch time…Taco Bell or the Corner Market.</p>
<p>Just want to add, the article is being misunderstood. The headline is a little incorrect.</p>
<p>It sounds like lots of districts are using hand stamps in ways other than how it is being described in this article. I can totally understand a school stamping the hands of kids who use up the last bit of their money and need to bring more tomorrow, or stamping the hands of all kids after they buy so that they don’t come back through the line.</p>
<p>But the article clearly states that the FRL kids are being stamped for not having money. That is, that every child who has a zero balance gets a stamp, even if the reason why they have a zero balance is that they don’t have to pay. If the purpose of the stamp is to remind kids to tell their parents to send money, then why would a kid who doesn’t need money to get lunch get one. What is the purpose of the stamp?</p>
<p>I’ll also say that the worry about “stigma” goes beyond just worries about kids teasing. At our school teachers don’t have access to children’s lunch status. That’s considered confidential, and for a good reason. The reality is that in our country right now there are many many teachers who believe that children living in poverty need lower expectations across the board. As a parent, and a teacher, who has seen plenty of that behavior, I wouldn’t want my child’s teachers to know if my child was receiving FARMs assistance. A fellow 2nd grader might not have the sense to figure out what it means when a child came back from lunch stamped day after day after day, but you better believe that a teacher would figure it out pretty quickly.</p>
<p>In addition, there are families who believe strongly that financial information is private, and that children should be protected from taking on adult knowledge or worries. Those parents may choose not to tell their children that they’re on FRL. In that case, a child coming home every day saying “lunch lady put this stamp on me, because you didn’t pay” is going to get awkward pretty fast.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that what the article alleges is the whole truth, but I also wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that just because some, or even many, schools use stamps appropriately, there wasn’t a problem at this school.</p>
<p>Guys – do you just believe every stupid slanted story you get from Fox News and/or MSNBC?</p>
<p>The school (like many/most) stamps hands to remind the little kids to tell Mom/Dad when they get home to put some more cash in the online lunch account. Once that happened to my kid a few times I signed up for my kid’s online lunch account to get auto-refreshed and avoid the hassle. </p>
<p>If you are on free lunch, then you’d never have a zero/negative balance on your account, right? This school just happened to temporarily have a software glitch so that the cash register operator couldn’t see the difference between zero balance kids and free lunch kids.</p>
<p>The school, which is near where I live, is an outstanding charter school that is routinely ranked as one of the top public schools in the entire country. It is so horrible that it typically gets about 5 lottery applications for each 1 available seat. Despite the fact that it is located across the street from a trailer park. You’d be lucky to have a school like this in your hometown. </p>
<p>But don’t let the facts get in the way of a good left/right agenda axe-grinding. Sheesh!!</p>
<p>“Peak to Peak Charter School is considered highly decorated. It has been named a John Irwin School of Excellence several times, a direct result of the school’s “Excellent” CSAP score. Additionally, it was named the number one High School in the Denver metro area by 5280, a Denver lifestyle magazine, in August 2007. During the same year, they were also named number 47 on the US News and World Report listing of best schools.”</p>
<p>Here’s what actually happened. Good example of how you shouldn’t believe everything you read. Especially when it comes from a source that has a demonstrated political bias (right or left):</p>
<p>"Peak to Peak Charter School’s executive director of operations, Sam Todd, issued a statement Wednesday defending how the food services staff handled hand stamping at the Lafayette charter school. </p>
<p>"In his statement, Todd said stamping the hands of students whose lunch accounts are low or empty to alert parents is a common practice used in many schools. The practice had been in place at Peak to Peak for years, and was used in Boulder Valley’s non-charter schools up until about five years ago. </p>
<p>"Problems arose when, in the fall, Peak to Peak hired six new food services staff members, implemented a new food services payment system for parents and installed a new food services software program that staff needed to use, he wrote. One of the problems with the new software program was that cashiers could no longer identify students who qualified for the free and reduced lunch program, he wrote, and some of those students mistakenly had their hands stamped. </p>
<p>“This was a grievous mistake, and when it came to light, the food services staff and the software company worked quickly to resolve the issue,” he wrote in the statement. “The school immediately stopped the past practice of hand stamping, and the software issue was fixed.” </p>
<p>You may like the idea of fingerprint scanners, but that technology was strongly disliked by quite a few families at other schools. See Fingerprint school lunch programs raise concern - 19 Action News|Cleveland, OH|News, Weather, Sports</p>
<p>I don’t have sympathy for parents who are worried that their children’s fingerprints may link them years later to a crime. </p>
<p>This same concern came up when fingerprinting was used for ID for missing child prevention.</p>
<p>You may not have sympathy for parents who don’t like fingerprint scanning, but put that together with those who don’t like their kid’s getting hand stamped, those that think students should remember to tell their parents that their lunch accounts are low, those who think that no student should ever be given a cheese sandwich even if the parents haven’t paid a lunch bill in a month, and those who think kids ought to be smart enough to carry a note home that they get at lunch time – and you see why school administrators have a tough job. There is no solution that pleases everyone. Nada. Zilch.</p>
<p>Northwesty had you not posted the facts, there might have never have been 9 pages of nonsense spewed by people who would never let the truth get in the way of them sledgehammering their opinions on you. Of course now that the truth is known there will probably be another 9 pages that has nothing to do with the original topic. Thank you Al Gore for inventing the internet.</p>
<p>I’m fascinated by the desire to keep financial information away from teachers. Wow. That was so not our experience in elementary school. My kids went to classmates birthday parties at the homes of everything for physicians to hairdressers. Big, fancy houses and 2-bedroom apartments and everything in between. They were interested in party games and cake. I was a reasonably involved school parent and I knew who was who so I can’t imagine a teacher not being aware of some of this…stamp or no stamp. A classmate announced to my daughter when her dad lost his job and they couldn’t afford a field trip. There were no secrets and there was no stigma. Different worlds, I guess.</p>
<p>Keep financial information away from anyone whose business it is not. That would include teachers; why is it their business? If I am rich and my kids have holes in their shoes, whose business is it? If I am poor and I waste money on new sneakers for my kids, whose business is it?
Schools used to paddle kids too. Schools used to pay for all extramurals. Schools used to have daily PE at all age levels. To say that the reason that stamping (applying a chemical to) my child’s hand is okay because other schools do it, that’s ridiculous. </p>
<p>Feel like people defending this would be looking for BPA-free water bottles and worried about preservatives, and they are putting ink, which may or may not be for stamping people vs. papers, on your child’s hand?</p>
<p>Going back to the original story, stamping kids on free or reduced lunch, I must be missing something. Are they stamping them because free lunch = only one free lunch? Or are they stamping them for some other reason?</p>
<p>PS - I know quite a few people who work in cafeterias, and though they are all wonderful people, they are very low paid and kept part-time to avoid having to give them benefits. I also have parents who grew up in poverty. It is like the case of the bus stop monitor letting a child who just sustained a head injury with bleeding get on the bus, instead of calling 911. I am not happy that those with direct contact with our children are low-paid and get no benefits.</p>
<p>As noted above, the story that set this off is slanted and misleading.</p>
<p>The school in question, an outstanding charter school, has been stamping the hands of pay lunch kids for over 10 years. Never stamped free lunch kids hands. Exactly like thousands of schools across the country do.</p>
<p>This September, the public school district made the charter school switch over to a new POS system for the cafeteria. The new system had a glitch that could not distinguish between (i) pay lunch kids whose parents needed to add to their kids’ accounts and (ii) free lunch kids. When the glitch was discovered, the software was fixed and the stamping practice changed.</p>
<p>If the local school district had left the charter school alone with their prior system, this never would have come up. </p>
<p>The principal who got fired is claiming (through her lawsuit threatening attorney) this is why she got fired. Seems like a stretch to me.</p>