Georgia School Board Hires Collection Agency to Collect on Unpaid Lunches
 

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BRANTLEY COUNTY, Ga. -- The school board in Brantley County, Ga., has hired a collection agency to recoup the cost of unpaid school lunches, saying it's thousands of dollars in the red.

School officials said the the board is roughly $25,000 in debt as a result of unpaid $1.25 lunches.

Some parents said they're on the fence about the collection agency.

"If they can't afford it, they can't afford it," grandparent Robin Batten said. "I wouldn't think so to force them."

"I think parents should be responsible," parent Leah Wainwright said. "I pay for my kid's lunch. Why shouldn't everybody else?"

Brantley County school nutrition director Cindy Ham said this is a last resort, but a necessary one.

"OMD Circular 887 -- it's a federal guideline -- requires that there's no indebtedness to the school nutrition program," Ham said.

Glynn County, a much larger neighboring district, had upwards of $40,000 in unpaid student lunches. Instead of reaching out to a collection agency, it took a more creative approach.

The Glynn County School Board said in a statement: "While we considered implementing a collection agency, at the beginning of the 2010 calendar year, we chose to provide those students with outstanding lunch debt a cheese sandwich and carton of milk for lunch. In doing so, we were able to feed children in need and encourage parents to pay back their debt."

The school board said it reduced its debt by nearly half.

Sounds fine to me. If a parent can't afford $1.25 to feed their child, then they should probably just go ahead and sign custody over to the state.

They should hire bullies...they always get lunch money.

Do they offer the free lunch program for low income families there?

WIN. This made me laugh.

I really hope you're joking.

You think the state of Georgia is properly taking care of the kids already in foster care?

If I were the school I think I might have tried to do something creative like ask (all) parents if they would like to donate a few extra dollars to the school lunch program so children who cannot afford a lunch can still have one.

Wow. In VA, if you don't have lunch money, you're hungry until you get home.

You're kidding right? You do realize that for these kids there's probably not much food at home either?

wow. in ohio, not only is there a free lunch program, and a reduced lunch program, there are free and reduced breakfast programs (each depends on household income and # of people in the household). but there are voluntary non-profit programs(often run by teachers) that collect food to make sure kids have something to eat over the weekend. in a lot of district, kids eat lunch on friday, and then dont have anything to eat until they get back to school on monday.

sad, all the way around.

There's free and reduced price lunch in Georgia too. It's a federal program, so I bet every state has got it.

http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/Governan...lityManual.pdf

I don't think it requires much supporting documentation to qualify.

Some parents who owe may have recently fallen on hard times, but some people are deadbeats and choose not to pay for things they could pay for, particularly when they learn nothing happens when they don't.

Other parents could chip in to cover them, or the parents who haven't paid could make paying to feed their own children a higher priority, either with cash or by doing the paperwork to document that they truly can't afford to.

Just racking up charges isn't the answer, but they were probably kind of taught in previous years, by the district's failure to aggressively pursue the debt, that they didn't have to. Now they do.

$1.50 is a pretty cheap lunch...is that what school lunches cost, or is that the reduced rate? If reduced, these parents have already shown that they don't have much in the way of funds.

1.50 was what it was at my high school. Not reduced.

Cheap stuff. And I still love it. As creepy as it sounds, I wish I had high school friends who could bring me those 1.50 lunches.

Absolutely untrue. Virginia has always had the free and reduced breakfast-lunch program.

Here is the program in the Arlington public school system and it is in every school system in VA: http://www.dcmassc.org/Job%20Support...hool_lunch.pdf

Correct (in general) and Virginia realized that decades ago.

I don't even know if my high school had a cafeteria. I remember buying bagels and just-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip Otis Spunkmeyer cookies from the DECA-ran student store, but I don't think I ever went into the cafeteria.

I now understand why the food our schools serve is such crap. $1.50 doesn't buy anything healthy. Maybe one apple.

ETA: Has anyone else watched that Jamie Oliver "Food Revolution" show that is all about rehabing our country's school lunch guidelines? It's really interesting. It's a movement he's bringing from England, where he WAS able to change the country's school lunch program.