For our Closer Looks this week we are going to look into the Anti-Lunch Shaming Act of 2017 which was referred to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in May 2017.
This is an interesting bill, mostly because I am inclined to think you cannot enforce a law that requires or prohibits something like shaming people. But the more I read about this issue and began to understand what was happening and how it influences children’s lives, the more I came to see it as a good idea.
What is “Lunch Shaming”?
“Lunch shaming” is treating children that cannot afford lunch differently, which can lead to embarrassment or bullying. The type of “shaming” this movement focuses on is practices like putting a mark on kids (with ink stamps, Sharpie markers or wristbands), giving them a less desirable alternative meal, removing perfectly good food from them if it is found they have inadequate funds, making children to perform janitorial duties or forcing kids to go hungry by not feeding them. All of this because their parents cannot afford to pay for lunch or didn’t realize they needed to give their kids more money to put on the account. These students, who are often very young, have zero control over their families’ finances and the ability to pay for lunch. To me, it seems incredibly unfair and cruel to punish them in any way, especially a public way. This doesn’t even take into account what toxic environment school is nowadays.
How this Issue Came to be.
A 2014 study from the US Department of Agriculture found nearly half of all school districts around the country practice some form of lunch shaming. In 2017, The New York Times released an article titled “Shaming Children So Parents Will Pay the School Lunch Bill”. According to the article, in Alabama a child was stamped on the arm with “I Need Lunch Money” and one day a Utah elementary school threw away the lunches of about 40 students with unpaid food bills. Marty Stessman, the superintendent of the Shawnee Heights Unified School District, noted that their younger children are allowed to take a limited number of meals if they have debt, but high school students are not.
There are other stories of teachers and other people who work in schools holding fund raisers to try to wipe out school debt (the money schools are left to pay when families cannot or do not pay their outstanding lunch bills). A theater technician mentoring kids in Houston started Feed the Future Forward after he saw a cafeteria worker refuse to serve a child the hot meal. Feed the Future Forward hosts events like crawfish boils and golf tournaments to raise money. In other places, schools have started GoFundMe pages.
The USDA tried to force schools to think about this practice and come up with standards for dealing with it. Instead of prohibiting practices that stigmatize children with meal debt, they offer a list of “preferred alternatives” like payment plans and not withholding hot means from children with unpaid balances. The federal free meal program is one solution that could help many people. The issue with this program is not every struggling family meets the income requirements. Further, some families that do meet these requirements may not fill out the paperwork due to language barriers, fears over immigration status, or other confusion.
The Bills.
The Anti-Lunch Shaming Act is based off a 2017 New Mexico bill titled “Hunger-free Students’ Bill Of Rights Act”. NM SB374 is the first comprehensive state effort to address lunch shaming. The bill outlines the following provisions:
- All children receive a reimbursable meal
- No alternative meals be served
- Applications for free and reduced-price lunch be made available and accessible to parents
- Districts coordinate with their local liaison for homeless students
- Foster children be automatically enrolled for federal meal benefits.
While the New Mexico law expressly requires that all children receive a reimbursable school meal (meaning not a worse “alternative” meal), regardless of meal debt, the federal Anti-Lunch Shaming Act does not.
The Anti-Lunch Shaming Act aims to stop a few different practices:
- Prohibit schools from stigmatizing children with hand stamps, wristbands or other public means
- Prevent schools from forcing children to perform chores in order to receive a meal
- Stop lunch workers from disposing of a meal after it’s been served to a child
- Require all communications regarding lunch bills be directed to parents or guardians instead of children
The Anti-Lunch Shaming Act also wants to streamline the process for applying for free and reduced lunch. It aims to make it clear that Congress expects schools to give applications to families in need, coordinate with other programs to ensure that homeless and foster children are enrolled for free meals, and set up online systems to make paying for meals easier for parents.
The bill’s sponsor, Michelle Lujan Grisham from New Mexico, stated “No student should be humiliated in front of their peers because their parents can’t afford to pay for a meal. It is shocking and shameful that this happens to hungry children, but nearly half of all school districts use some form of lunch shaming.”
There are currently eleven bills across the country having to do with lunch shaming.
A Different Bill.
There is also another school lunch focused bill, the Local Control of School Lunch Act, aims to rollback some nutrition requirements for school lunches put in place by the Obama administration. Some of the rules the bill would get rid of are calorie limits on meals, specific sodium requirements and “the percentage of grains made with enriched or whole grain flour.” People who are for the bill say it allows schools to have more autonomy with ingredients and price of the lunches while opponents say these requirements are necessary to ensure children are properly nourished.
Cover Photo by Isabella and Zsa Fischer on Unsplash
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