VE HAF RULZ!

[Hawkmoon]

http://www.myfoxny.com/story/24587771/school-seizes-lunches-from-students-and-throws-them-away

Cliff's Notes version:

School uses prepaid accounts for cafeteria lunches. Kids get food first, then swipe card. Kids with low funds have lunches confiscated -- but food once served can't be re-used, so it got tossed while the kids went hungry.

Brilliant. Government-think at its best.

God forbid a kid might be allowed to eat the food today and replenish the account tomorrow ...

[TechMan]

IIRC there reports of this type last year as well.  If so it goes to show they will never learn.

[MillCreek]

Ms. MillCreek 1.0 runs the nutrition services for a school district of 22,000 students.  I like to call her the head lunch lady.  Her district uses the system where parents pay to load up a card that the student uses to pay for lunch.  That way, the district does not have to handle cash in food services.  Her approach is to send several notifications to the parents when the account is running low.  If the parents still don't pay and the account runs out of money, they give the child a cheese sandwich, piece of fruit and carton of milk only until such time as the parents load up the account or fill out the paperwork for the free or reduced lunch program.

Her program has to cover all of its fixed, variable and labor costs out of the revenue of selling food and she gets no money from the district.  In addition, she has to give everything over a certain amount to the district general fund, so that in a sense, she is a revenue generator for the district.  People skipping out on the bills is a direct hit to her bottom line, so they do take enforcement action.  A couple of years ago, she was out $ 35,000 on parents skipping out on paying the lunch cards for their kids, so the school board directed the cheese sandwich approach, and to send the deadbeat parents to collection.  You should all be happy that your taxes are not subsidizing deadbeat parents who can afford to pay for school lunch.

[Boomhauer]

IIRC there reports of this type last year as well.  If so it goes to show they will never learn.

Why would they learn? Who's going to make them? The school districts don't give two flying *expletive deleted*s what the parent's opinions are. The school district's view is "this is how we're gonna do it and you're damn well going to like it. We don't care if it makes sense or not, we don't care how it looks, this is how it will be handled"

[dogmush]

So we should teach the kids that they can get food without paying as long as they promise (pinky swear) that they'll get it tomorrow?

What do you think happens at Starbucks if the coffee is already poured and you can't pay?  Or a Bar? (hint: same thing)

Yes it's a little wasteful but someone needs to teach these kids to have the scrip for what they want before they order it.  And apparently their parents are in need of a similar lesson.


We don't need to run a line of credit for forgetful parents at school lunches.

[Scout26]

How about they move the card swipe machine to the front of the line??  Then if little Johnny or Jane's parent(s) didn't reload their accounts you can either kick them out of line before any food is served or go with Cheese sandwich option.


Remember TANSTAAFL ?  It truly applies in this case.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

Kids do ala carte. Price varies. They use id numbers here no card

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[MillCreek]

How about they move the card swipe machine to the front of the line??  Then if little Johnny or Jane's parent(s) did reload their accounts you can either kick them out of line before any food is served or go with Cheese sandwich option.

My ex does something like this at her schools and she says most other districts do this as well.  She says this way makes sure that you do not humiliate the kids because you can figure out the problem before the kid goes through the line.  She has a real issue with how the district in the news story handled this because the kids are held up to ridicule.  Another advantage of the card swipe system is that no one knows if the child is on the free and reduced price lunch program which is important for their dignity.  She says that in the 'old days', kids on the program might have a special colored coupon or token and the other kids could tell that Johnny's parents were poor.  Now, the kids all swipe the same card and go through the same line.

[RoadKingLarry]

The school my kids went to started a card program where we had to prepay the card, they would do 1 charge if balance wasn't kept up. The mouth breathing, cleptomaniac slug* the school system put in charge of the system had the bad judgement to loudly and publicaly inform my wife that we were behind in our payments one evening at the local grocery store. I wish I had been there to see it.
It took almost 2 weeks to get a lisitng of our kids accounts. Come to find out while my daughter had been away from school for a week attending some national band thing she had rung up 4 lunches and my son had been charged for 3 lunches the week he was out of school sick.
Anther fireworks show I was sorry to have missed. They did at least find the mouthbreathing cleptomaniac slug another position in the lunch lady line up where she didn't have access to money.


*We had gone to school with her, I wasn't too keen on her even being employed at a school let alone actually handling other peoples money.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

Sigh. We have folks all zomg rfid obama fema camps over the card thing.its painful

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[MillCreek]

Sigh. We have folks all zomg rfid obama fema camps over the card thing.its painful

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We had a similar thing here in Tacoma when the local school district lunch program was thinking of switching from a card reader to a palm reader, to cut down on the problems with the kids losing or forgetting their cards.  The tinfoil contingent was out in strength at the School Board meetings, that this was the first step in government databases, and tracking and sending data on what little Johnny ate to Michelle Obama for JBT raids by the food police, etc.  The district cancelled the plans for the palm reader.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

Here its usually the same folks. The vaxxer truthers common core family tree is very inbred

Like jeff foxworthy says. No branches

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[lee n. field]

  The tinfoil contingent was out in strength at the School Board meetings, that this was the first step in government databases, and tracking and sending data on what little Johnny ate to Michelle Obama for JBT raids by the food police, etc. 

Well?  Aren't they?  Not that doing it with a fingerprint reader tattles back to the overness any less than a swipe card.

[Hawkmoon]

A couple of years ago, she was out $ 35,000 on parents skipping out on paying the lunch cards for their kids, so the school board directed the cheese sandwich approach, and to send the deadbeat parents to collection.  You should all be happy that your taxes are not subsidizing deadbeat parents who can afford to pay for school lunch.

I don't dispute the problem of deadbeats.

I just don't see how dishing up the food and then discarding it rather than allowing the kid to eat it in any way ameliorates the problem.

[MillCreek]

Well?  Aren't they?  Not that doing it with a fingerprint reader tattles back to the overness any less than a swipe card.

My ex-wife says no, but I don't expect people to be convinced.  They believe what they want to believe.

[MillCreek]

I don't dispute the problem of deadbeats.

I just don't see how dishing up the food and then discarding it rather than allowing the kid to eat it in any way ameliorates the problem.

My ex-wife agrees; she thinks it was poorly handled, and she suspects that it was a single lunch lady or kitchen manager that was doing this, and it may not have been district policy.

[lee n. field]

My ex-wife says no, but I don't expect people to be convinced.  They believe what they want to believe.

Is school lunches not a USDA program anymore?

[Tallpine]

We had a similar thing here in Tacoma when the local school district lunch program was thinking of switching from a card reader to a palm reader, to cut down on the problems with the kids losing or forgetting their cards.  The tinfoil contingent was out in strength at the School Board meetings, that this was the first step in government databases, and tracking and sending data on what little Johnny ate to Michelle Obama for JBT raids by the food police, etc.  The district cancelled the plans for the palm reader.

Wouldn't it be easier just to tattoo a bar code on their hand?    

[Balog]

Here its usually the same folks. The vaxxer truthers common core family tree is very inbred

Like jeff foxworthy says. No branches

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Lumping folks that disagree with common core in with vaxxers and truthers is pretty petty and insulting even by your low standards.

[AZRedhawk44]

School uses prepaid accounts for cafeteria lunches. Kids get food first, then swipe card. Kids with low funds have lunches confiscated -- but food once served can't be re-used, so it got tossed while the kids went hungry.

If you don't eat your meat extruded protein sheet, you can't have any pudding.  How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat extruded protein sheet?!?

The suggestion that school lunch programs are actually revenue RAISERS for schools is awful.  Coupled with schools being deliberately abusive, miserly and wasteful by throwing food away...

I like the way it used to work back when I was a kid... a stupid blue ticket.  You buy a book of them every month or whatever, and take one each day with you to the lunch line.  I don't remember the per-ticket price, but I think it was something like $0.50 to $0.90 per ticket as I was going through school.  A kid's happy meal at McDonalds, for comparison, was maybe $1.99 I think?  Late 80's.

By High School we had an a la carte system and we were all paying cash... consequently, lunch lines were really stinking slow.  But in the mid-90's I was paying $1.50 to $2 per day for school lunches.  I have to admit that High School food was higher quality than the Elementary fare, so the increase in price wasn't all from inflation. 

What are kids paying now for lunch?  Is it a la carte even at the elementary school level, and kids have to pay per item?  Have you actually seen the food and/or tasted the quality of the food your kids are getting for that price?  Is it worth it, in your opinion?

[MillCreek]

Is school lunches not a USDA program anymore?

It is, and the USDA wants aggregate data in terms of costs, commodities used, number of people who buy meals, etc.  But the people who think that granular data down to the level of if little Johnny selected the pudding cup versus the fresh fruit cup is gathered, recorded, and then sent to the Feds,  it is not.  But there are many people who think this.

[MillCreek]

The suggestion that school lunch programs are actually revenue RAISERS for schools is awful. 

The interesting thing about this is that there are national food service companies who come to the School Board and make a pitch for outsourcing the school nutrition program to them.  They have lots of Powerpoints and income projections showing how they will make a profit for the school district.  One of the main ways they have of doing this is firing all the nutrition program staffers and rehiring them at lower wage rates.

[RevDisk]

The interesting thing about this is that there are national food service companies who come to the School Board and make a pitch for outsourcing the school nutrition program to them.  They have lots of Powerpoints and income projections showing how they will make a profit for the school district.  One of the main ways they have of doing this is firing all the nutrition program staffers and rehiring them at lower wage rates.

You get what you pay for. I've made it a personal rule to never continue working at any place that ever cuts my wage. Oh, I'd smile and take it. Until I found another gig. I'd also only do my job, and nothing more. No suggestions on how to increase efficiency or reduce costs.

I've always found that "fire the person without any cause, and offer them their job back at maybe 60% of their original wages" to be very distasteful. I hope someone leaked those PowerPoint slides.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

Lumping folks that disagree with common core in with vaxxers and truthers is pretty petty and insulting even by your low standards.

Its unfortunately true here
For pitys sake va doesn't do common core and we've had the ranters show up agitated at meetings seemingly unable to grasp that while va was a part of tbe standards development we opted out thinking ee could go higher independently. I am not totally unsympathetic to fears folks have over what they've been told it represents.  However in this area at least the representatives of opposition are members of multiple groups I had mentioned.  The guys the other parents roll their eyes when they show up, usually with a videographer. Its good entertainment but folks leave early for work and a 8 pm meeting we like to get things done and humoring these folks isn't on the to do list.

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[MillCreek]

You get what you pay for. I've made it a personal rule to never continue working at any place that ever cuts my wage. Oh, I'd smile and take it. Until I found another gig. I'd also only do my job, and nothing more. No suggestions on how to increase efficiency or reduce costs.

I've always found that "fire the person without any cause, and offer them their job back at maybe 60% of their original wages" to be very distasteful. I hope someone leaked those PowerPoint slides.

The interesting thing about the staffing, according to my ex-wife, is that some of them would pay her to work.  These are primarily older women whose kids are grown, and they like to have a reason to get out of the house for a few hours and dish up food on the lunch line.  They like to get out, socialize with their friends beside them on the lunch line, see the kids, and maybe earn some pin money.  They work maybe two to three hours per day setting up, serving, and then tearing down and cleaning up.   It kinds of reminds me of my neighbor across the street: she has been working in HR at Boeing for years and years.  She can well afford to retire, but her husband died several years ago, and her kids live out of state, so she says she primarily goes to work for the social aspects.