A new bill has unanimously cleared the House and a Senate Committee and would make it illegal for Virginia schools to engage in "lunch shaming," policies that single out students who repeatedly show up to school without lunch money.
When I was a kid, I often would forget to grab lunch money before leaving for school. Not wanting to go hungry, I bought school lunches on "credit." The lunch ladies would always remind me that I had a bill. When it came time to get my report card at the end of the quarter, one of my parents would need to pay that debt before getting to see my grades. Well, times have changed. The Virginia Senate Education and Health Committee just voted unanimously 15-0 to end the practice of lunchroom shaming in the Commonwealth. If House Bill 50 makes it to the governor's desk for signature, it would prohibit school lunchrooms from treating students differently for owing significant amounts of money for school lunches. In Virginia, some schools have given in-debt students special wrist bands, or written on their hands, "I need lunch money," so that parents would get the message when their children returned home. Other schools have required students to do some clean-up chores in order to get lunch room credit. Harsher school programs would even force children to throw away their lunch if they reach the register and are unable to pay. All of that would be banned under House Bill 50. It unanimously passed the Virginia House last week, and the unanimous Senate Committee vote suggests it will have a similar reception when it reaches the Senate floor.
The average school lunch in Virginia costs around $1.90, but the price for a school lunch can increase to around $3 in parts of Northern Virginia. Children who repeatedly show up to school without lunch money can quickly amass significant debts.
Families that qualify for federal assistance are already eligible for free and/or reduced price lunches. A family of four generally needs less than $45,000 in yearly income to qualify, though that does not always take local cost-of-living realities into account. Like all federal programs, the income cut-off can leave families in a hole who are on the cusp of receiving federal assistance. Of the almost 1.3 million school children in Virginia public schools, the federal free and reduced lunch program covers 572,000 of them (roughly 44 percent of the state's student population). House Bill 50 would apply to the 56 percent of students who do not receive lunch subsidies.
This legislation, however, deals with the symptoms and not the underlying issues themselves. Telling schools that they are not allowed to "punish" students who repeatedly cannot afford lunch may spare children the embarrassment of being called out in front of their peers, but it does nothing to address the fact that these kids are being left out of important government assistance programs. Banning lunch money debt shaming doesn't address the fact that many families are being allowed to just go into debt in order for their children to have a school lunch.
If there is enough lunch shaming to prompt the Virginia legislature to unanimously pass a bill, then state legislators should focus on the issues of inequity that cause the issue in the first place.
What do you think? Should lunch shaming be abolished or not? Let us know in the comment section below!
