Quandary

By: Carol Maxym, Ph.D.

This morning I heard the following story on NPR:  A mom had tweeted on Twitter or posted on Facebook (maybe both??) that when her son went to purchase his lunch at the high school cafeteria, he was told that he had overspent his meal allowance and wasn’t allowed food.  He offered to pay some of the bill with the $2 in his pocket ($3 short of the total), but was told that wouldn’t do.  His lunch was thrown into the trash.  The boy called his mother who came to his rescue, took him out for lunch, then went to the school, paid his bill (the e-mail about him being “overdrawn” on his lunch money account had only been sent out that morning), and paid an additional $60 to clear unpaid bills for other kids, so no one else would need to go through the humiliation and hunger her son had just faced.

So, the fact is, I probably would have done the same thing as this mother.  I would have been incensed as the stupidity of denying him lunch only to throw the food into the trash.  (Apparently it is mandated that the food be thrown into the trash…because of contamination???).  I would have put out $60 to make a statement that kids shouldn’t have to be put through such nonsense, be humiliated, and go hungry.  

But then I must think a bit more deeply.  In a different day and age, the young man would not have been able to appeal to his mom via telephone for immediate rescue.  He would have been obliged to figure it out on his own—one way or another.  Might he have had to go hungry?  Yes (but then there a lot of kids in this country who arrive to school hungry every single day), and that would be unpleasant but not really much worse.  Humiliated?  Well, and there isn’t much else to say on that.  And he would have had to deal with it all on his own.  Would he have learned from the experience, grown from it?

I think about a couple of other points:  I am saddened that the person who threw away the food couldn’t come up with a better solution to the problem, but then that person worked for the food service company contracted to prepare and serve the lunches at the school. so her/his responsibility was to do as trained.  Maybe there is a problem that the food service is outsourced and so there is a responsibility to “bottom line” that supersedes responsibility to be a bit generous to a kid who doesn’t quite have the sufficient funds for his lunch—this one time—and does offer to pay what he has.

And throwing the lunch in the trash.  I just have trouble figuring out how that made more sense than to let the kid each the lunch.  

There is also and very much the issue that if kids were responsible for their own lunch money instead of having an account that is kept filled by Mom and Dad, then if Johnny didn’t have the money to purchase lunch, it was completely on him.  Old fashioned, but a good way to make sure the responsibility stays as close to the right place as possible.

So, thinking about it, what this incident makes clear is that while there may be conveniences to have accounts for kids to purchase lunch with Mom and Dad being in charge of making sure there are funds there, and it may be more cost efficient (but then I wonder if it really is) to have a food service company preparing and serving lunches, perhaps the more “convenient “ way is not the best or even better way for kids to get lunch at high school.