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Cafeteria Workers Going to the Mattresses

Okay, so it's lunch time and you're a junior high kid in the cafeteria eating your nutritious, "yummy" hot lunch when suddenly the nice cafeteria workers come up, snatch your tray, dump it in the garbage and hand you a sack lunch.  Bewildered you turn to the 149 other kids holding brown bags and ask, "What happened?"

It happened at Vera C. O'Leary Junior High School in Twin Falls, Idaho on Monday and according to the Times-News, school officials say it was because the students were behind on their school lunch payments.

Cafeteria workers threw out the students' hot meals and replaced them with sack lunches while charging them full-price for a hot lunch.

District officials say the purpose of the brown-bag lunch was to encourage students to pay their delinquent lunch accounts, but others say the district was coercing students into paying off their debt by humiliating them.

"It was perfectly legal, and it was not done to set those students apart from the others," said Mary Lu Barry, secondary programs director for the Twin Falls School District. "It was done to send the message to students that if they want regular school lunch they have to pay the fee."

Seems a little extreme — cafeteria workers using mafia tactics on junior high kids "encouraging" them to pay up.

Update 04.06.07 07:21:  The Times-News has a follow-up opinion here.

April 04, 2007 at 08:30 AM |

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Comments

Sara

Wow, that's horrifying.

Posted by: Sara | April 04, 2007 at 01:19 PM

MountainGoat

Yeah, what's next, breaking some knees, maybe a nice pair of concrete boots?

How about just not serving the kids until they pay their bill. What's with letting them get the meal and then dumping it? It was all about humiliating the kids and at that age that's the last thing they need.

Posted by: MountainGoat | April 04, 2007 at 02:13 PM

MountainGoat

Seem the Times-News readers are a little upset too. Here are some snips:

"Hmm so, let's see if this equals out, throwing away food and humiliating the kids is a better approach than calling the kids parents when the lunches weren't being paid? Sorry,that doesn't fly and whoever said this stunt wasn't supposed to humiliate them is full of it too. That was the EXACT reason they did it...."

"This is an embarassing oversight on the part of all adminstrators and supervisors involved--how can ADULTS justify throwing out perfectly good food in order to humiliate children? I think this display shows where the real immaturity lies--with the school leaders."

"What good was accomplished by taking meals already served, away from kids and throwing the food in the trash. [...] Whoever ordered that stunt should be reprimanded. The school district has forgotten who employs them."

Posted by: MountainGoat | April 06, 2007 at 07:29 AM

Tara Rowe

When I was in school in Cassia County we had "The Lunch Nazi." If you were in line for lunch and hadn't paid your bill or when she scanned your card and you were in the whole a meager $.25, she would give you a lecture right there in the line in front of the entire student population. As if the lecture and humiliation of it all wasn't bad enough, if you were in the hole even by a penny you weren't allowed a hot lunch--they brought brown bags with pb&j sandwiches and an apple for those who had delinquent accounts...Ridiculous if you ask me. Sounds like that isn't only policy of the Cassia County School District (or at least a handful of schools in that district), but a spreading trend in the entire Magic Valley.

Posted by: Tara Rowe | April 06, 2007 at 01:02 PM

MountainGoat

I just don't get the value in humiliating a kid. Isn't it still the parents' responsibility to pay for the school lunch...not the kid standing in line getting humiliated and definitely not the kid getting his/her tray snatched?

If school districts have an ongoing problem with delinquent accounts, maybe they need to rethink their whole payment policy--especially if humiliation has become the accepted practice for dealing with it.

Posted by: MountainGoat | April 06, 2007 at 05:12 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

MountainGoat
MountainGoat

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