wildre wrote:
When did they start allowing kids to charge lunch at school? We either brought out own,which was sure to be better than the school lunch, or paid up front for what we getting.
I don't recall it ever being a "cash and carry" type of thing (not where I went to school anyway). I do remember that in grade school, the parents basically pre-paid like a month in advance. They'd send the lunch schedule out in a newsletter type thing, and the parents would send in a check with the days/meals they wanted for their kid. A number of lunches arrived at the school equal to the number that were ordered (this was grade school, so no cafeteria). Your name was on a list. If your name wasn't on the list, you didn't get a school lunch. It was pretty simple and there was never a problem.
Today, they tend to use credit systems. The parents pay into it, and the kids buy lunches out of the fund. Very much like food cards at universities. In theory it gives the kids more choice about what they eat, but it leads to the problem in the linked story. The kid walks up to the lunch line expecting to get a lunch, and is rejected cause he's out of money. Oops. It's a lot easier to forget to fill a fund like that then to forget to do a once a month order. Also, it's a lot easier for the school to just let the money slide and allow the credit to go negative so that the kid can get his food, which leads to parents being less diligent about it, and results in a school district being $140,000 short in it's food program. That's a lot of parents forgetting to pay their lunch fund...