And yet, all too often you hear about disgusting shit like ...

Obviously, any profession is going to include a certain number of loathsome shitheels. It's just that you think of school teachers and administrators as people who got into it for the love of kids. It's not like those jobs pay much, after all. So while you may get some lazy or incompetent faculty, you don't expect these people to be running toddler fight clubs in the basement.

6 California School Districts Steal Low-Income Students' Lunch Money

XiXinXing/iStock/Getty Images

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Low-income families can't always afford to send their kids to school with lunch money, so to prevent these kids from coming in every day with a pack lunch consisting of a block of dry ramen and bread crusts, schools allocate funding to provide lunches for them. Unfortunately for kids in California, some schools have regarded this funding as free money that taxpayers have thrown randomly at them to spend however they like. And "however they like" rarely involves cheap meals for poor kids.

Sneksy/iStock/Getty Images

"If anyone asks, just say that we're cracking down on childhood obesity."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

To be specific, eight school districts around California were found to have misappropriated this money, but the good news is that it was only, uh, $170 fucking million. They channeled the cash into other school expenses, like staff wages (because teachers gotta eat, unlike poor students, apparently), building repairs, and goddamned catering for school board meetings.

It gets worse. The missing money for reduced-cost lunches obviously had to be offset somehow, and schools achieved this by serving kids lower-quality food, cutting down on cafeteria maintenance, and shortening lunch periods -- all of which served to discourage the poorest kids from using it. And it worked! The result was a significant drop in the participation rate for the program. And remember that here "drop in participation" means "an impoverished child didn't eat."

lightkeeper/iStock/Getty Images

Unless they ate each other, which officials said "basically solves the problem."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

But hey, you can't claim these kids aren't getting an education out of it. Finding out just how little the system gives a shit about them is the most important lesson they'll learn all year. You just might not like what they do with that information.