school lunch

Parent Cafe
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<p>[Nation</a> & World | For status-conscious students, no free lunch | Seattle Times Newspaper](<a href=“http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004252841_stigma01.html]Nation”>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004252841_stigma01.html)</p>

<p>*SAN FRANCISCO — Although Francisco Velazquez, a 14-year-old freshman with spiky hair and sunglasses, qualifies for a free lunch at Balboa High School here, he was not eating. He scanned a table full of friends and asserted, “I’m not hungry.”</p>

<p>On another day, a group of classmates who also qualify for federally subsidized lunches sat on a bench. One ate a slice of pizza from the line where students pay for food; the rest went without.</p>

<p>Lunchtime “is the best time to impress your peers,” said Lewis Geist, a senior at Balboa and its student-body president. Being seen with a free or reduced-price meal, he said, “lowers your status.”*</p>

<p>When my daughter qualified for FRL, she still didn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria- not because in her case she was worried about status, but because the food was :p.
Greasy , heavy, laden with salt. Not very appealing especially for kids who have a hard time getting interested in food anyway.</p>

<p>Some schools in Seattle have separate lines for students on FRL, way to marginalize students guys!
We have more problems with the socio economic divide in the city schools- but the racial divide is what gets the money thrown at it.</p>

<p>The kids on FRL most need a good healthy tasty meal, but they are the least likely to be getting it.
If they are hungry, how can they learn?</p>

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<p>I saw this article, thought it was good that this issue is being addressed. Kids should not feel stigmatized over what they eat, because the main thing is that they MUST eat to learn. Federal rules about what is provided and what is prohibited have been a factor, and probably the best solution is to keep all the junk out of the school lunch system. Of course, pizza is not junk and ought to be an option.</p>

3

<p>Our elementary school was in a nice small town, middle class district, but a lot of parents were in the construction field, between work not being every day or every week and self-employed deductions, many of them could qualify for free & reduced but would never ask, they wouldn’t want the small town school staff/secy/etc to know how some years were a struggle. I do recall the lunch line for those meals was no big deal in the lower grades, as every one hit the same line, but middle school had two lines and kids did not care to be in the free lunch line.</p>

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<p>We fortunately live in a district where everyone uses the same lunch card. It’s like a debit card. It is coded so that it withdraws the correct amount and no one knows who paid what for their lunch. Everyone goes through the same line. That is how it should be.</p>

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<p>In our school everyone has numbers. You give your number to the cashier and the money is deducted from your account. Works great.</p>

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<p>This year at my son’s middle school, everyone qualifies for a free lunch. Apparently, the number of kids who qualified reached some kind of critical mass and they just decided to include everyone. I think in our district the lunch tickets look the same regardless of whether you pay or not and you buy the tickets or receive them in advance so no one really knows in either case.</p>

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<p>I used to do program audits for the free lunch program in Texas in the early 1980’s. My understanding was that this was a federally funded but state administered program. There was a requirement that was part of every audit check that students could not identify who was on a free lunch and who was paying for lunch (and we auditors assumed students were very smart). I thought that was a federal rather than state requirement so am really shocked by this article. </p>

<p>If memory serves, most schools had a ten digit number on the lunch ticket that included a zero in the 4th number or something like that to denote free lunches. The location of the key number would change periodically. There were rules about how the lunch tickets were purchased so no student could tell and many times the kids on the free lunch reportedly did not even know they were on a free lunch. We spent a lot of our audit time helping schools that were running into any kind of problem due to some unique situation come up with a workable solution so something like this would never happen. Absolutely inexcusable to see this kind of outcome.</p>

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<p>Our school is like singersmom, the kids use their school id card to purchase food - it’s a pre-loaded debit card. The kids with reduced lunch have a certain amount pre-loaded on it. Our kids lunches are fairly healthy with a daily salad bar and they are no longer sell any candy, soda or chips other then baked chips. For our family, it’s a moot point because my kids never wanted to wait in line and brought their own lunch. My son buys maybe 6 times a year.</p>

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<p>Our district uses the student number method. Everyone is in the same line. And the food is pretty good.</p>

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<p>That’s stupid.</p>

<p>Then again, lower middle class neighborhood. Half my friends are on that.</p>

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<p>I attended public school from 1958/59 - 1970/71. My small town’s school district served children from many socioeconomic backgrounds. The district participated in the National School Lunch Program. Every Monday morning, parents sent their children to school with a week’s worth of “lunch money” and “milk money” (paid in cash, most likely on a sliding fee scale) which was collected by classroom teachers. Every day, all elementary school students had a morning “milk break.” Students (from Grades 1-12) who brought lunch from home received additional milk during lunch at school. Students who opted to eat the standard school lunch (then called the Type A lunch) were provided with a full meal, from soup to dessert, including milk. Given that each student’s “lunch money” had already been pre-paid, students moved through the lunch lines quickly, and had plenty of time to eat. The school lunch menu changed daily, and each student was served an identical school lunch. It was a nutritious, efficient, and egalitarian system.</p>

<p>Fast forward to my daughter’s elementary and secondary public school years.</p>

<p>My daughter’s first school district operated on a pay-per-week/month basis. Payment by cash or check was collected by the school office, and students were assigned a PIN number to use in the lunch lines. All students were served the same standard school lunch. </p>

<p>Her second district operated the same way, although by the time she entered middle school, independent food vendors which contracted with the district provided cash-and-carry “alternatives” to the standard school lunch. Regardless, most students chose to eat the standard school lunch, and FRPL status was not an issue among students. </p>

<p>In her current district, it’s been a whole new ballgame. There is a great divide between the Haves and the Have Nots in this snobbier-than-thou urban community. Although the standard school lunch is offered to all students, only FRPL students are allowed to pre-pay and to use a PIN number; all other students must pay cash in-line. My daughter reports that many students (even FRPL students) avoid eating the standard school lunch because the line is so long and moves so slowly that by the time students get their food, there’s little time left to eat. She also reports that students (both FRPL and non-FRPL) who choose to eat what the snob students call “the poor people’s lunch” are sometimes openly ridiculed, and they often ridicule themselves. Many students (including FRPL students) opt to buy from cash-and-carry independent vendors who charge outrageous prices for food my daughter describes as “gross.” Lunchtime is handled so inefficiently at my daughter’s school that although juniors and seniors are encouraged to eat off-campus, about half of the students who remain on campus for lunch often don’t bother to eat anything.</p>

<p>If it were my call, I would boot the independent food vendors out, offer the standard school lunch to all students, and allow all students to have a pre-paid lunch account with a PIN number.</p>

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<p>My S’s h.s. has an independent pizza vendor who sells it for $3 a slice. Besides the regular lunch line, there is an ala carte line where they can buy subs, chicken sandwiches and burgers and fries daily. All these cost a lot more than the regular lunch. Some kids eat pizza and fries every day according to S.</p>

<p>I’m not sure how the FRL system works in high sch… All the kids had the PIN numbers in elm/mid. sch. My s takes cash daily. The ala carte line gets too expensive for us. My S gets the regular lunch most days ($2). The kids refer to it as “the two dolla holla”. They literally race to the cafeteria to get to the head of the line. Otherwise most of the lunch period is used up waiting. They tried having a “senior” line is the past but gave it up. No one is allowed to leave the school for lunch. </p>

<p>When I was in h.s we had to buy lunch tickets in homeroom every day. They also passed out the exact same tickets to those getting FRL. It didn’t take long for some to figure out how to work the system. A lot of the FRL kids would bring something from home to eat (or not eat at all) and then sell their free lunch tickets at a discount to those who were planning to buy a regular lunch ticket. There were always “lunch deals” going on in the hall before homeroom,lol.</p>