Members of the community were outraged, and the school board apologized. But the uproar over a misguided letter masks a far worse national scandal — that we are not providing free lunch to every school child in America.

Parents who owed more than $10 received a letter informing them that if they didn’t pay up they could be “sent to Dependency Court for neglecting your child’s right to food” and their child could be taken away and placed in foster care.

Last month, officials in the Wyoming Valley West School District in Pennsylvania faced a dilemma in getting parents to pay their children’s share of a $22,000 school lunch debt. They came up with an insidious solution.


“School meals are as important to learning as textbooks and pencils,” Diane Pratt-Heavner, of the School Nutrition Association, which advocates for school lunch providers and has called on universal free lunches, told me. “Ideally, there would be funding to serve all students free meals so this would not be an issue.”

Yet, in recent years, stories like the one from Pennsylvania have proliferated.

In Rhode Island, a school district gave cold meals of sunflower butter and jelly sandwiches to students who couldn’t afford lunch. In Alabama, an elementary school stamped “I need lunch money” on a student’s arm. In New Hampshire, a worker was fired for serving lunch to a child who couldn’t pay. A Minnesota school district threatened to deny caps and gowns for kids whose parents hadn’t paid their debt.

In 2017, New Mexico became the first state to prohibit these lunch-shaming practices. Other states have followed suit.

But these steps aren’t relieving the burden on school administrators. Or on the 75 percent of school districts nationwide that report having unpaid school lunch debt.


What would it cost to ensure that every child has a free lunch? According to Janet Poppendieck, a senior fellow at the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute who has written extensively about school food issues, a reasonable back-of-the-envelope calculation is $15 billion. That would be in addition to the $13 billion currently being spent by the federal government for free or subsidized lunches.

For comparison’s sake: The Pentagon recently requested more than $11 billion for 78 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which is the most expensive weapons system in history, and is unlikely ever to operate as advertised.

It also asked for $10 billion to build three nuclear submarines, and $14.6 billion for ground combat systems, i.e. tanks, personnel carriers, and amphibious combat vehicles.

For much the same money spent on protecting America against foreign rivals that don’t directly threaten the United States and lack the military might to do so even if they wanted, Washington could end the stigma of lunch shaming. Students would no longer have to go school worrying about getting a hot, nutritious meal. Beyond that, “universal school meals might improve the quality of the meal itself,” said Bettina Elias Siegel, a school food advocate and author.

“Right now, districts spend considerable time and money processing annual federal meal applications, resources which could instead be directed toward better food,” Siegel said. Since school districts are so reliant on student contributions in paying for the school lunch program, they “often resort to serving pizza and burgers and the sale of a la carte snacks with junk food brand names,” Siegel added. Without the financial pressure to recoup the cost of providing student meals, school districts could focus on the far more important priority of giving kids healthy and nutritious food to eat.


Considering that America’s obesity rate is the highest in the developed world at 40 percent — and the child obesity rate is approximately 19 percent, a 34 percent increase since 2000 — giving kids more nutritious food options should be a national priority.

Doing so could, ironically, also help the military. Today, more than 70 percent of Americans lack the educational ability or are simply too overweight to serve in the armed forces.

But from a broader national security perspective, the lunch shaming debate is at pace with the larger failure of the world’s wealthiest country to provide adequately for its citizens — a situation made worse last week by the Trump administration as it unveiled plans to crack down on food stamp eligibility, and in the process take away free lunches from 500,000 students.

The president regularly extols the economic progress under his watch and brags about increases in defense spending, but it’s hard to see a path to American greatness and long-term security when parents are being threatened with losing their kids and children are being shamed because they can’t afford to buy lunch. To allow such a situation to continue is to shirk our most basic public responsibilities to the next generation of Americans.


Michael A. Cohen’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @speechboy71.