Giving Compass' Take:

• The New Food Economy reports on the increase of student lunch debt and how this problem not only is affecting families and schools across the country but that it shows how this broken system uses students’ needs as collateral to leverage money from parents.

• The median lunch debt rose from $2,000 to $2,500 per school between 2016 and 2018.  How can schools across America strike a balance between accommodating those who can’t pay for lunch and balancing their books?

• Here's an article on New York City's no student goes hungry proposal. 

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. Previously, he’d worked in warehousing. She couldn’t afford to cover the cost of a full-price, hot school meal every day—not if she wanted to pay the bills, too.

Every day, Kyrie did what school kids across the country do. He punched his student number into a keypad at the end of the lunch line, ate his food in the cafeteria with friends, and got on with the second half of his school day.

Read the full article on student lunch debt by Jessica Fu at The New Food Economy.