Giving Compass' Take:

• Candrice Jones shares her story about dealing with school lunch debt and the negative impact it can have on a student's academic experience.  

• How can schools mitigate the effects of student lunch debt so as not to outcast students from their peers? What can donors do to help families and schools find a balance?

• Read about why student lunch debt is a huge issue. 

Candrice Jones thought she was in the clear. It was the fall of 2015, and she had just submitted the necessary paperwork to secure free lunch for her son Kyrie, a seventh-grader at Coolidge Junior High School in Granite City, Illinois. This, she believed at the time, would lift a significant economic load off her plate. Jones was working various part-time handwork jobs for a temp company, and her husband was unemployed after suffering injuries in a car accident.

But over a year later, Jones discovered that Kyrie’s free lunch application had been processed incorrectly. After she’d submitted it, the program covered Kyrie’s meals for just one month. Reimbursements then dropped off for reasons the school has not made clear to Jones. Instead of getting free lunch every day, Kyrie had been racking up lunch debt—nearly $1,000 worth of it.

Generally, parents can monitor their children’s lunch balances online. Coolidge Junior High, like many schools, uses a software system called Skyward to keep families updated on grades and lunch dues owed. But Jones didn’t use the program because Kyrie’s grades weren’t logged into that particular system. He has a learning disability and participated in an individualized education program, which provides its paper evaluations by mail.

Jim Greenwald, superintendent of the Granite City School District, declined to comment on the Jones’s case for this story, citing privacy guidelines. But he did point out that all students are served hot meals regardless of their ability to pay. Which isn’t the same as getting free lunch. Students still remain on the hook for every lunch they eat. That’s the reason why, even now, Kyrie’s middle-school lunch debt remains on his record and continues to cast a shadow over his academic experience.

Read the full article about school lunch debt by Jessica Fu at The New Food Economy.