As a child, New Mexico State Sen. Michael Padilla cleaned tables, worked in the kitchen, and served full meals to other students during school lunch, all to earn a different, less nutritious meal afterward. “I didn’t see it as shaming at the time, but I did feel very different from the other children,” says the Democratic majority whip, who grew up in foster care. Although the US government has long offered the poorest students meal assistance, some families do not apply, and others do not qualify but still struggle to pay. Their children often face a range of humiliations in school cafeterias: Staff may force them to work for meals, make them wear a sticker to show they could not pay, publicly throw their lunches in the trash, or give them a cold cheese sandwich instead of a hot lunch.
But these practices may be starting to change. In April 2017, New Mexico—where 70 percent of students receive some form of lunch assistance—became the first state to ban “lunch shaming.” The Hunger-Free Students’ Bill of Rights Act, which passed with support from both political parties, requires any school that participates in a national meal program to provide meal assistance applications to students’ legal guardians. It also calls for school administrators to assist families who need help completing the application, to follow up if a family qualifies for assistance but has not applied or owes money for five or more meals, and to complete the application themselves if necessary.
“We are a credit society, so we should settle our debts through credit,” says Jennifer Ramo, executive director of New Mexico Appleseed, an anti-poverty group that helped write the bill. “Feed the kids, give them nutrition, don’t humiliate them. Settle the bill afterwards and don’t disrupt their school day.”
In May, a bipartisan group of national lawmakers introduced a similar bill, the Anti-Lunch Shaming Act, in the US House and Senate. “No student should be humiliated in front of their peers because their parents can’t afford to pay for a meal,” one of the bill’s sponsors, Democratic Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, said in a statement, “but nearly half of all [US] school districts use some form of lunch shaming.” Other states, such as California, Texas, and New York, are also considering legislation against lunch shaming.
A key goal of these bills is to transfer responsibility from students to their guardians. “A lot of schools have unpaid school meal debt, and it does make it hard to operate your school nutrition programs in the black,” says Crystal FitzSimons, the director of school and out-of-school-time programs at the Food Research & Action Center, a US anti-hunger nonprofit. “We understand that schools can struggle with this. But we feel very strongly that the efforts should be focused on the parents, not the kids.” Organizations such as FitzSimons’ played a large role in raising the issue of lunch shaming with lawmakers and continue to lobby against what they see as a barrier to children’s feeling of belonging in school.
The Lujan Grisham cosponsored bill isn’t the only recent national effort to regulate how schools feed low-income students. In 2010, the US Congress passed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act to increase funding for federal meal programs and low-income students’ access to nutritious food. However, the bill did not specify a deadline by which school districts had to begin following its guidelines. It was only last year that the US Department of Agriculture responded by asking schools to establish policies for dealing with unpaid meal costs—a request that brought more attention to lunch shaming.
Like the 2010 act, New Mexico’s new law will rely more on the honor code and ongoing pressure from nonprofits and media than on a strict timeline for enforcement. “The media attention has helped spread the word, and we do have internal public education audits of all school programs. This will help bring accountability,” Padilla says. Kirsten Tobey, cofounder of Revolution Foods, a food service company supplying nutritious student meals to schools throughout the United States, says it will fall on states to enforce New Mexico’s law and any similar ones that pass in the future. “My experience is that the state agencies heavily monitor and enforce the school meal guidelines through audits, paperwork, and other mechanisms,” she says.
Of course, eradicating lunch shaming will not eliminate many of the challenges that poor families face in covering their children’s expenses. What it will do is stop blaming kids for their families’ circumstances and, perhaps, make school a friendlier place for students to learn and grow.
Read more stories by Noël Duan.