Help fight child hunger through the Souper Bowl of Caring! Child poverty and hunger are reaching alarming levels in Utah. More than 170,000 Utah kids are eligible for free school breakfasts and lunches and another 50,000 are eligible for reduced cost meals. School breakfast and lunch programs help, but what happens on the weekends?Feel free to follow the above link to encounter another link to the Souper Bowl of Caring link.
This is what they posted on their Facebook page last evening. It's quite the contrast in messages:
Dear patrons and Uintah Elementary parents,To summarize: The Salt Lake City School District implemented a new meal tracking system and there are still bugs when it comes to notifying parents of low/negative balances. Meanwhile, the school district became concerned that several students at Uintah Elementary School have negative balances and they began the process of reaching out to several -- but not all -- of the parents.
We have been investigating the lunch situation at Uintah Elementary School and would like to share the following information.
On Monday, a district Child Nutrition manager was sent to Uintah Elementary School to investigate the large number of students who had zero or negative balances in their school lunch accounts. That same day, the district manager and the local school kitchen manager started making calls to inform parents of the negative balances.
On Tuesday, the calls to parents continued. When lunch time came, students who still had negative balances were told they could not have a full meal but were given a piece of fruit and a milk for lunch. The district does this so children who don’t have money for lunch can at least have some food and not go without.
Unfortunately, children are served lunch before they get to the computer for payment. The children who didn’t have enough money in their accounts had their normal food trays taken from them and were given the fruit and milk.
This situation could have and should have been handled in a different manner. We apologize.
We are also investigating what type of notification parents may or may not have received prior to this week. The schools says they inform students when they go through the lunch line if they have a low balance. They say they also send notes home in the student’s Monday folders. However, when contacted Monday or Tuesday, many parents were surprised by the news. The district has specific guidelines for school kitchen managers on how parents should be notified, and we are currently investigating to see if these guidelines were followed correctly.
We understand the feelings of upset parents and students who say this was an embarrassing and humiliating situation. We again apologize and commit to working with parents in rectifying this situation and to ensuring students are never treated in this manner again.
Before they completed the process of contacting parents, the district decided to refuse meals to the children whose records showed negative meal balances. But the district cannot figure out which kids have positive or negative meal balances until they get their food and go to the cash register.
So these kids got their meals, went to the cash register, had their lunch trays taken from them by school officials, and then their lunches were dumped in the trash. Each kid was given a carton of milk and a "piece of fruit" to replace the meal that was just dumped in the garbage.
I have read news accounts that anywhere from 30-40 children were affected by this decision. I have also read interviews that at least some of the parents involved actually had positive meal balances.
If the school district was truly concerned about the expense of these unpaid meals, then how is the value of those meals regained by dumping them in the garbage?
And how did this process of taking food from confused children reinforce the Salt Lake City School District's support for overcoming child hunger via the Souper Bowl of Caring?