Live Oak must stop stigmatizing teens in free lunch program
Schools need more students like Live Oak’s Andy Cunningham, the
student body president whose concern for his fellow students goes
well beyond the mundane.
Live Oak must stop stigmatizing teens in free lunch program
Schools need more students like Live Oak’s Andy Cunningham, the student body president whose concern for his fellow students goes well beyond the mundane.
Cunningham spoke Monday to the Morgan Hill Unified School District’s newly seated Board of Trustees over an issue of health and dignity for a number of his classmates.
Cunningham’s request was simple and glaring. He wants the district to find a way for students who get reduce-priced or free lunches to be indistinguishable from students who pay full price.
With separate (and unequal) lines for the nutritionally balanced meals that make up the federal program and the junk-food fare the school also serves, Cunningham says students are stigmatized by their socioeconomic status.
The lunch program offers the $1.50 meals for up to 40-cents, depending upon a family’s income level. Participation district-wide ranges from 68 percent of those who qualify at the elementary school level to just 17 percent of those who qualify at the high school level.
Those statistics make it easy to see that many high school students are embarrassed to participate in their formative teen years, where the desire to fit in is overwhelming.
Sadly, some might be passing on their only nutritional meal of the day.
Principal Nancy Serigstad says administrators have been powerless to change the system; state law forbids the selling of the nutritional meals in the same line as junk food. However, other schools have found ways to circumvent the problem. Gilroy and Fremont schools use prepaid cards, and even Morgan Hill elementary students have ID’s that allow them anonymity.
The irony of the system is that students who receive the meals are not supposed to be identified. Even school officials don’t know their names.
The telltale sign, then, is the line in which they stand.
“It’s shameful,” Cunningham told trustees. “It’s a situation that should have been taken care of years ago.”
We agree.
