Most American headline

Not wanting to feed children doesn’t seem very pro-life.

My wife runs a school kitchen, a big school, 2k+ high schoolers and almost 20 staff. Her pay is actually terrible, but the job has good medical insurance and I'm self employed with no benefits so she's been sticking with it. Collecting debt is part of her job. They never withhold a basic meal (no extras if they have unpaid debt) but that meal gets added to their debt.

They don't threaten anything legal like in this story, but they will not give you your diploma or transfer your credits if you haven't paid your debt in full. We're in Ohio.

Yet another reason why I hate every goddamn billionaire with the fire if a thousand suns.

Eh, not just America sadly. Half the world seems brainwashed into thinking that feeding children is controversial. The BBC did an article the other day about 500,000 extra kids getting them, and it got 9000 comments, split equally between "fair enough" and "but what about my tax money? 😢"

They should give the Libertarian nutcases a large enclave, and all the people who moan about their taxes being spent on other people should be forced to go and live there.

Oh, there's a pothole on your road? Hope one of the residents can afford to have it fixed. You were burgled? Can you afford to pay the police company to look into it? No streetlights, sorry. That's a waste. You carry a torch and light your own way. Pensions? Didn't you save enough?

Stop worrying about the tax bills of billionaires, for fucks sake. They can get by with less.

Just a reminder that the same people who are against free school lunches for children are the ones who stand in front of abortion clinics screaming about how abortion is murder.

My school held my diploma for 6 months because of $20 worth of lunch debt that turned out to be a computer error.

That was 12 years ago.

Schools using food as a weapon against students is nothing new.

This is a little different but it sticks out.

My baby brother was born in 91 and when he eventually got into kindergarten one of his teachers flagged him for his speech impediment. He'd pronounce his P's as B's.

He was 5 and talked a mile a minute before he was two. He just couldn't quite get the hang of that one part.

My parents weren't worried. We were all helping him. My other brother and I were 6 years older than him and we we're latchkey kids by the time I was 10.

My parents worked second/third jobs and second/third shifts rotating to make everything work for us. We barely saw them both at the same time.

I remember my Ma, and even Pops, being pissed as fuck and our chores and cleaning day was ramped up for a month or two, and all us kids had individual therapy sessions where they grilled us with questions we didn't understand because the school call CPS on them because they wouldn't (read: couldn't) make after school speech therapy work with their schedules and they knew he'd learn on his own eventually anyway. They just made my parents lives that much more stressful in that time.

This was over 30 years ago now and I have my own kids, and bonus kids even! I have my own stories I could tell but this is the absolute worst because I saw how much it stressed out my overworked parents. My brother is a functioning member of society who got over his slight speech impediment within the year, with our help but mostly letting him develop on his own time.

Meanwhile, us kids just considered it a matter of course that we wrap up plates and Tupperware after each meal. One plate for Gertie our nextdoor neighbor and whatever was left went to Jorge's family two doors down. We also learned how to mow the lawn only so the Grandma and Grandpa Hass, our other next door neighbors wouldn't have to anymore. They weren't actual family but they were to us. Jorge's family got all my and my brothers' hand-me-down clothes for his younger siblings, too. We didn't quite understand why at the time. It's just what you do. But yeah, make a struggling family's life that much harder with your performative concern.

Getting school lunches is so foreign to me, but then again people here in NL just bring home made sandwiches, which are generally cheaper to make than food like in the picture.

At least in the schools I went to when the teature noticed somebody didn't have lunch with them on a consistent basis they would ask what was wrong and give them food.

Some other kids just kept eating unhealthy food every day because the school was still selling that. Heck in my first highscool they sold candy every thursday or so. It was an interesting time.

So it's too expensive to provide school lunch, but not too expensive to completely take over the care of the children entirely. More and more, I understand what people mean when they say the cruelty is the point. This makes zero goddamned sense.

America, the only country where they think they could not be any more selfish.

State doesn't pay for kid's lunch. If parent can't afford kid's lunch, state takes child and places them in a foster home. State pays foster home many many times the cost of lunch to take kid.

Tell me what the goal of this system is so I can call someone else a conspiracy theorist for a change.

Kids having lunch debt is the most American thing I've ever seen.

Kids go to public school during lunchtime. Public school feeds the children lunch (something with real nutritional value that we would all want our kids eating). Kids do not pay for this. That's it. There should be no further discussion here. If you disagree with this I want to put my thumb into your eye socket in the worst way. It's so fucked up this is even a topic of discussion.

But why oh why aren't people having kids?!

Isn't this several years old, or is it happening again?

The state wants to own your kids, that way you’re out of the way and they have slaves for life

Lunch debt? The fuck outta here with that dystopian nightmare shit

I highly doubt that image represents the food US kids get in school. It's too healthy and good looking (not saying it looks good, just better than it actually would be).

Punishing the poor for the crime of poverty.

How typically conservative.

Christ empowered his followers to clothe the naked, feed the hungry and tend to the sick. For some reason American Christians have decided that these explicit dictates should he ignored, much like the reminder that it is not their role to judge, so that they can instead focus on bigotry.

"The Wyoming Valley West School District Board of Directors sincerely apologises for the tone of the letter that was sent regarding lunch debt. It wasn't the intention of the district to harm or inconvenience any of the families of our school district," the school said in an "apology letter" on its website.

The fuck it wasn't

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49117936

How the fuck is that supposed to fix anything? It's easily cheaper for the state to pay for their lunch.

Do the schools actually have the authority to do that or is it like all those other empty threats I use to get? It's insane, but not surprising that the schools would threaten that. The sort of family who has to skip on paying lunch debts also doesn't have means to talk to a lawyer.

edit:

Luzerne County's manager and child welfare agency director have written the superintendent, insisting the district stop making what they call false claims.

Yup, empty threats made to impoverish families.

"You might be giving your kids a terrible childhood, so we're going to ensure they have a terrible life starting in our first-class foster care system"

I don't think there's any other country in the world that has such policies.

Starve your kid or lose them. That's quite a choice for a poor parent to make.

My late father grew up in an orphanage because my grandfather was too poor to care for 5 kids and a sick wife. My grandparents were able to take the kids home on Sundays though, so it wasn't a situation where they yielded full custody. I'm not saying an orphanage was ideal, but it's a shame that these days there is not the same kind of middle ground where kids can be cared for but still stay connected to their family. I guess that is too much of a social safety net for conservatives to tolerate.

Who made this warning?

I need a name

Because that has nothing to do with debt, putting kids in foster care wound only cost the state even more money

That is only about unbridled power and control

Absolutely delusional

Sounds like a fly-over shit hole state to me.

This sounds like a great way to generate a different headline,

"Local man kills 4 in attack of school board meeting after losing his children over school lunch debt"

If you want to look at this situation from an economic point of view ..... what's cheaper?

Pay a kids lunch every day for about 12-14 years .... and for a growing kid, the price wouldn't be that much, especially if you are paying in bulk amounts for hundreds or thousands of kids.

or

Don't pay their lunch, let the parents go into debt, take the kids into foster care .... now you as the government have to pay for legal expenses to take the kid away, expenses to have police and social service workers to do the work, foster expenses to house the kid and care for them (now you are having to pay for every single meal for them for years), give up the kid once they become of age and go out on their own after foster care as a disillusioned, angry and frustrated young man or woman who will more than likely end up on the street dealing drugs, crime or prostitution ... who will then grow up causing or contributing to crime and increasing the costs of police, legal, emergency health care, security and penitentiary .... and chances are they will have children who will end up at school not being able to pay for their lunch

....

If you pay to help the kid when they are young, there is more of a chance they will grow up to be a contributing healthy member of society. If you don't they will become a lifelong burden on society and cause endless expenses that will be far more money than any school lunches you could have bought when they were ten years old.

Grew up with lunch debt as a kid and that headline boils my blood in ways I probably shouldn't say out loud.

The same as debtors prison, how is that supposed to fix anything? Accomplishes literally nothing other than punishing people for being poor.

how about you start punishing companies for not paying people a livable wage?

If every American learned what citizens in other 1st world countries have that we don't, there would be a revolution tomorrow.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/20/us/pennsylvania-school-lunch-debt-trnd

Unless this is happening again, this story is from 2019. Still bad, just not recent

Imagine going into lunch debt for horrible cafeteria food

I’m from this region of Pennsylvania. Abuse and bullying is protected by the culture of this region. The sheriff’s office has done mass murders against strikers in the coal fields. 1860’s I believe. This guy stepped down. But his sentiment carries far in the community. It’s a bigoted hate filled hole.

A literal gun cult is financing far right radicals into local politics. A hate group is trying to force schools to out children who say they are gay. And YouTube protects their account where they post hours of hate content.

I worked with the president of the group before. He was fired from his job because he was accused of stealing $15,000.

Unfortunately nothing new. I remember as a kid that if you didn’t have money in your lunch account, your lunch was taken away and if you were lucky they’d have a peanut butter sandwich for you.

If you were in a negative balance, such as if your parents were unable to pay, then you’d also be restricted from certain activities and pressured to make your parents pay what was owed.

That picture of the food is a damn feast compared to what actually gets served.

And they have the nerve to ask why people aren't having kids anymore

not jealous of the Chadian infantry who are going to have to liberate Pennsylvania when the regime shatters

the saddest part about American volk is that they can't even pretend they don't know what's going on because they do it to their neighbors

You wanna eat?

You want to eat?

No more parents!

I think school lunch should cost something, but very little, just so the kids can understand the value of money

like a dollar per lunch isnt that much at all

but it shouldn't place a large financial strain on poor families

edit: I honestly feel like a lot of you are simply looking at the upvote/downvotes ratio and basing your reaction off that rather than the content. If the lunch is cheap enough, everyone will be able to cover it, but I'm advocating for making it cost slightly more than zero