Got their lunch “repo-ed”

The issues involving the inflated self-esteen of today’s youth are well known. So imagine my surprise when I read about the Twin Falls, ID School District poked the egos of the little darlings with a pin for being past due on their lunch bills

Students who fell behind on school lunch payments were stunned Monday afternoon when their lunch trays were taken from them and dumped in the garbage.

Cafeteria workers then gave them a sack lunch and two words of advice – pay up.

The Twin Falls School District refused to serve hot lunch to more than 150 students at Vera C. O’Leary Junior High School on Monday because they were not paying for their school lunches. 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.”

She said district officials were shocked when the junior high reported more than $600 in unpaid lunches – the highest unpaid school-lunch balance in the school’s history.

The school sent a letter to parents informing them that some students were not paying for their lunches, and cafeteria workers informed students when their accounts were delinquent.

Twin Falls has one of the first biometric lunch account systems int he country (fingerprints). I wonder how the adults that were so hip on getting this system set up think about it’s accuracy now?

I’d also like to have been a fly on the wall when the kids got home and told their parents what happened that day, just so I could get to hear the kids reply’s when their parents asked them what they’ve been doing with the money they send with them to pay the lunch bills.

Hey, if someone else besides me is in trouble, I’m all for getting the juicy bits.

Found at Just Some Poor Schmuck