There were better ways than that
At least the people publicly humiliated by the Soup Nazi on “Seinfeld” were adults. (And, not incidentally, fictional.)
Muscogee County schools and their food service staffs are entitled to the benefit-of-the-doubt presumption that children who have come through the cafeteria line with unpaid lunch bills weren’t subjected to embarrassment quite as withering as “No soup for you!”
Still, the fact that those students have in the past had their food trays taken away (and the food thrown away) and replaced with an alternate meal of sandwich, fruit and milk is pretty appalling.
Policy changes for how such situations will be handled in the future were announced at Tuesday night’s meeting of the Muscogee County School Board, which is a relief. But it’s hardly unfair to ask: Who ever thought such a way of dealing with children and teens — people acutely vulnerable to embarrassment — was appropriate in the first place? Has there been no occasion when the obvious humiliation of some kid who had his or her lunch tray taken away prompted adults on hand to conclude that this was a really, really bad way to handle this?
Aside from the public punishment of young people whose fault it manifestly is not, there are other bothersome things about all this. Start with the fact that it stems from a whopping $3,542.54 deficit in a $20 million school nutrition program funded by the feds.
(Most of that has been offset by the generosity of members of the community who contributed to the fund when they heard about the circumstances, and board member Kia Chambers offered Tuesday night to make up the rest. That’s the best part of this story, and shouldn’t be forgotten.)
There is also the fact — almost literally an insult added to injury — that health department regulations required food taken back from a student to be thrown away. (Can’t pay for the chow, kid? Then it’s garbage.) The new policy, happily, will make such waste unnecessary. We also applaud the suggestions of board members Naomi Buckner, Vanessa Jackson, John Thomas and Cathy Williams that procedures for handling unpaid lunch bills be handled privately, before a student ever gets in the lunch line.
The schools are fixing something that shouldn’t have been broken — at least not in that way — in the first place.
Giving spirit
It’s last year’s achievement that will pay off this year and beyond: United Way of the Chattahoochee Valley once again topped its fund-raising goal, with a total of $7,123,001 in 2016, the largest local sum ever.
At a Tuesday celebration at the Courtyard Marriott in Phenix City, United Way President/CEO Scott Ferguson and 2016 Campaign Chairman Kieth Pierce paid tribute to the more than 150 companies and more than 16,000 individual contributors whose generosity filled the coffers. That generosity will help better the lives of thousands of people served by at least 57 funded programs in 29 partner agencies. That’s quite an impact.
This story was originally published February 22, 2017 at 4:47 PM with the headline "There were better ways than that."