...in Louisiana, a new statute that took effect last week now requires schools to provide a lunch or snack to children whose parents fall three days behind in lunch payments, and further requires school officials to notify the state's Department of Family and Children Services that parents are in arrears for lunch money.
The premise? Parents who habitually don't pay for their children's school lunches are potentially neglectful in other ways. They may be alcoholics or drug addicts. They may be abusing their children at home. You never know.
Falling at least three days behind in lunch payments is just the excuse the state needs to investigate...
...it's not about the money. It's about getting into people's homes and evaluating their parenting skills, and then imposing government control on parents and their children...
Reporting parents to the government for possibly neglecting their children is a serious and extreme step, and not one that ought to be triggered by delinquent lunch money.
Because the next step will be to open those brown paper sacks some of us are sending from home to decide, based on what's in them, who else ought to get a call from the government.
What do you think- is this statute the first step on a slippery slope? Are there better solutions than this?
I think there are other ways to have handled this without immediately going to this extreme. Many schools have a system where the parent sets up an auto-debit that puts funds into a lunch money account, or lunches can be charged to a credit card (the author of the article mentions this as well).
But investigating a family for neglect or abuse because they haven't provided lunch money three days in a row? Kids and parents not only forget about lunch money, but sometimes it is stolen, or the child spends it on something else. Once CPS opens a file on a family, it can be very difficult to get that case closed, and it will always be a smear that could cast undue suspicion on that family in the future.
BTW- this statute applies to families who don't qualify for gov't assistance. And I agree with Jim- if we are talking about kids who are not in the 'at risk' category, what's the big deal about missing a meal or two, or three? Now, if teachers, who are mandatory reporters, see other indications of neglect and abuse, and the parent is also notorious for forgetting the child's lunch or lunch money, then you have a reasonable suspicion that something's not right and that's enough grounds to open a file. But not just 3 days of forgetting lunch money.
I wonder if there is more to this than the reports I've seen so far. Because it doesn't make sense not to just set up a more efficient payment system. Of course, that's assuming a gov't run program can make sense. Maybe that's my problem right there.
Susan R
Blogging at At Home and School and Shelf Discoveries
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