• Cafeteria worker fired for giving student lunch won't return
    25 replies, posted
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/company-offers-rehire-worker-lost-job-over-free-223755966.html
Did they seriously make a Powerpoint presentation instead of an article to drip feed us a sentence every few minutes? Sad story though. At schools over here, poorer kids get free lunches - is it not like that in the US?
Free lunch programs exist in the US.
I'm not all that educated when it comes to this topic, but yeah. They pretty much make bank off of kids paying for each and every lunch they receive. Can't pay for the food once you're upfront? They pretty much take the food away from you, and hand you bread and peanut butter instead.
The way it was at the school I went is you could get a free meal, which usually sucked and usually got old and repetitive very quick, and in some cases wouldn't hold you out until the end of the school day. Or you could buy food that actually had variety and tasted good and could keep you full until you got out of school.
my schools had free lunch plans based on income. my family couldn't afford to pay for lunch meals from the school or made from home, but didn't qualify for even reduced-price lunches either.
I thought the US had free school lunch programmes? I know they do in the U.K, and if you didn’t get lunch to try and save money they would force feed you sandwiches. Can’t really blame them for being fired, if they have a policy against theft most are zero tolerance.
For a lot of schools around here, the free lunch program is terrible. The income limit was so low, that you could be ineligible just because one parent worked slightly above minimum wage. Of course, this meant that everyone and their brother lies on the forms. Being a VERY clique-y community suspiciously only certain families got away with it. All I remember is sitting in the front of the lunchroom basically being shamed and forced to sit there and eat expired peanut butter and jelly on stale bread. All while the kid who lived in an actual mansion and had parents who made over 150k each got a daily breakfast and lunch for a quarter each. Never doubt a small town’s ability to be so tight knit and cliquey. Sure they probably could have gotten it because of tax fraud, but all of the free lunch applications went through the school board where they decided who got it and who didn’t.
they're all needs based, underfunded, and politically tenuous because people can't stand the thought of children getting free stuff and can't connect the dots between poverty and negative life outcomes. We have this mentality that everything will just work out and no notion of investing in the future in this country anymore, the GOP is the party of here and now and never tomorrow
We have a free lunch program here in my city, plus free lunches throughout the summer.
"Free lunch" is only if you're poor enough. If you're only somewhat poor, you don't qualify. And if that means in practice you still can't afford lunch, tough luck the government doesn't give a shit.
There is a poor kid ""lunch"" which is literally a single slice of plastic ass American cheese between two bread pieces. That's it.
They are awful, though. In my high school the free lunch was a bottle of great value water and a smuckers pb&j.
Unfortunately that's how it is for a lot of financial assistance programs in the US. You have to be dirt fucking poor to get any assistance, even then it's usually just begrudgingly.
Me thinks every student should be entitled to a free lunch since school is mandatory.
When I went to school the free lunch was just the same stuff that every one else ate pretty much. You got your food then you put in your id number at the register and if you were on the free meals thing then you didn't have to pay. (well you actually were meant to use your ID cards, but I never brought it and I have my id number burnt into my memory cuz I made a song to remember it ) There was some extra stuff though that you had to pay for no matter what, but it was treats and shit like that from a different vendor iirc. I guess the school I went to was one of the rare ones that actually cared about its students, I don't ever remember having any problems with my free meals.
One of my schools not only had no free meal plan, but no cafeteria either. Instead a food truck would come every day and it was expensive. Like $7 for a plain hamburger expensive. It took all my allowance and all my lunch money to get through the day.
Question to all Americans that ate caff food in highschool- are students allowed to leave the school premises for lunch and eat somewhere else? (McDees, BK, Gino's, etc.). Because I remember my school caff had the worst poutine- resulting in not very many students buying food there. I'm only asking because all movies/shows that I can remember don't let students leave premises and they eat caff food.
They tend to be total fucking garbage though. Even in the places they're considered "good" they're still crap. When I was back in highschool my stepdad got something like a $0.15/hour raise and it was enough to bump us up from qualifying for free lunch all the way past the upper limit for reduced price lunches. I should add that at this point in time we were literally living in an RV and still had trouble making ends meet.
When I was in high school, Lunch was $1.25. If you didn't have it, you could charge your lunch. You couldn't charge it again until you paid it off. If you already charged and couldn't pay for your next lunch, they would take the food on your tray and throw it in the garbage There were fee waivers you could fill out at the start of the year so students didn't have to pay at all, but not many used it because who wants to be the kid who can't afford a dollar for lunch
At my school the paid lunch was usually a main, side, optional side, and milk; seniors could get chocolate milk, and other drinks or deserts were purchasable at vending machines. If you could not afford a lunch at all, the free alternative was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, an apple, and milk; not a bad alternative by any means but would certainly get old if you were poor. There was also a low-income program that let you buy regular lunches lunches significantly cheaper if you were below a certain income, so the sandwich was mostly an emergency backup. Unrelated but a couple quirks I noticed while I'm on the subject, some days they would serve Uncrustables which meant your option was basically buying a prepackaged PB&J or not paying and getting a full-sized fresh one, which was funny to me. And one thing that annoyed me was they would some days they would serve cheeseburgers and some days they would have a cup of pickles as a side, but in all my time at that school, not once did they ever serve cheeseburgers and pickles on the same day. That annoyed the crap out of me.
You could leave for lunch at my HS until the class two years ahead of mine acted out so much they had to stop it entirely.
sometimes you need a parent to sign a paper in order to get free or reduced lunches. When they don't, you don't get any lunch. That's what happened to me. I ended up stealing food from school anyways THe whole system is messed up. Sometimes abusive parents do not care if you eat and maybe don't want you to eat.
Even brand name fast food items that slid into Free Lunch line were no match for the foods in the Hot Line. My parents were appalled I skipped using free lunch for years, I think it was over the paper work being annoying to do.
At my high school, they let juniors and seniors leave the campus for lunch. Freshmen and sophomores had to say on campus, though.
Skipping school lunch for McDee's Hamburgers was my Mom's way of combating shitty lunch days or just making her own. Back in the day it was a thing for kids to do, but given school security today you would have to be lucky that there is even a option that's 10 minutes away to skip to. I couldn't do it because if security caught you they'd phone home for "ditching school" and the nearest food joint was 30 minutes if you didn't cut through the forest. US school lunches made hard dents in your stomach and your wallet in a month. If the rank "spicy chicken patties" didn't turn you away, the $2 for main items did. One sandwich and the baby bananas were too small so if you wanted a secret double meal that's $4 a day. I still remember the lunch cashier lady letting my unpaid meals slide because how much they were and how little it did for this hungry teen with an abnormal growing rate at the time.
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