what the hell is School Lunch Debt?

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So I’ve come across this piece of news where a so called „Arbys foundation“ payed 1000000$ to schools so that they can pay off their student‘s debts.

Now what I am wondering about, what does that mean exactly? Because what the article implies is that children are being indebted for free school lunches, which seems to lack a lot of nuance and would be illegal if it was true.

Does it simply mean that the schools themselves have to come up to pay, or is it a matter of the city government?

PS: I am German therefore I may have screwed up with the grammar and possibly the vocabulary too.

In: Economics

17 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You are assuming that the lunches are free. When I was in high school more than a decade ago, even a basic student lunch was 3-4 bucks. could be 7-8 for the nicer ones. Typically these are purchased using cash OR a student account that parents “refill” by writing checks to the school.

At a lot of schools, they have a policy. If a student’s account runs dry, rather than deny them lunch, the student can run the balance negative (up to a certain cut off) and get a basic lunch. That’s how this happens.

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