Nov 17, 2019 3 min read

The cheese sandwich is back.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a cheese sandwich, but it’s become the equivalent of a scarlet letter in some high school cafeterias, as it’s the replacement offering for students who would like to purchase a hot meal but cannot because their lunch debt is too high.

“Lunch shaming” became a statewide – and, indeed, a nationwide – issue in 2016, when a cafeteria employee at Wylandville Elementary School in Eighty Four quit in protest after she was forced to give a student a cheese sandwich rather than a hot meal at lunch. In a move worthy of Charles Dickens, she even said that cafeteria employees tossed out a hot meal the student could have had rather than the cheese sandwich.

The brouhaha that followed led Canon-McMillan officials to rescind the policy, and, in short order, it was banned across the commonwealth. The prohibition didn’t last long, though. This summer, the lunch shaming policy was reinstated with no fanfare.

Officials in Harrisburg made the about-face because too many districts are confronting rising levels of red ink from unpaid lunch debts. The Pittsburgh public radio station WESA-FM recently reported that the amount of lunch debt in the Bethlehem Area School District increased by more than 50% in the year after lunch shaming was taken off the menu. At the end of the 2017-18 school year, it came to $250,000. In the smaller Quakertown district, it was $27,000 in the 2018-19 academic year, and district officials are considering deploying a collection agency to get the money they are owed.

According to William Harner, Quakertown’s superintendent, “It’s becoming outrageous … We have to plan on this coming out of our general fund each year. Student debt is going to be categorized as the same thing as a lost library book.”

We can all probably agree, though, that a collection agency is preferable to what officials in Luzerne County’s Wyoming Valley West School District have been up to. Earlier this year, they told parents that their kids could end up being removed from their homes and put in foster care unless lunch debts were paid. Apologies were issued in short order.

This is a conundrum that defies an easy answer. Some officials believe some parents and students have decided that doing away with lunch shaming gives them a green light to eat on the house without penalty. But, by the same token, there are still students and families in Pennsylvania who are genuinely in need, but do not qualify for a free lunch. How do you differentiate between the two?

Last year, the U.S. Agriculture Department offered suggestions on how schools should deal with unpaid lunch debt, and they recommended that the focus should be on “adult(s) responsible for providing funds for meal purchases, rather than focusing debt collection efforts on the child.”

It goes without saying that every penny counts when it comes to public schools. But there has to be a better way to get some of those pennies than bringing back lunch shaming.