Imagine you have a child and you’re gong to buy clothes to dress them, if you pay cash then there is no debt if you use credit then there is a debt.
Is this the child’s debt? No its the parents’ debt for something they needed to buy for their child. The same is true for ballet lessons, if you’re supposed to pay on the first of the month but don’t then it is a debt incurred for something the child uses but it is legally and morally the parents debt.
In the United States you can’t legally sign any form of loan agreement or credit contract until you’re over 18 years old, before this point you need your parents to take legal responsibility for it. As you correctly assumed a child can not have debt in America.
Is this the child’s debt? No its the parents’ debt for something they needed to buy for their child.
Except for the fact that the child is punished for it via methods such as not being allowed to graduate if there’s any of this debt whatseoever, and in the language of the paperwork & websites used to pay it off it’s generally portrayed as debt belonging to the child.
Kids also used to flat out be refused food if they had lunch debt, but now kids just get a shitty non-nutritious “debt” lunch instead which is better than nothing I guess (but still causes them to be judged by peers). It’s actually not even illegal to prevent stigmatizing/shaming kids who have this debt…
I was nearly prevented from graduating (in Georgia, the same state in this article) because I owed something like $4 or $16 in “debt” to the school, lol. Schools can also prevent you from advancing to the next grade if you have debt.
It’s also completely legal to withhold school records, report cards, etc. from students if debt is unpaid – so even if the student graduates, have fun getting the things you need to go to college… oh wait, they’re not going to college anyways because they definitely can’t afford that. I don’t think they do that here though.
Also your comparison with ballet lessons is bad. Those are outside of the school system, outside any government organization, and it’s completely the parent’s responsibility and choice to even enroll the student in such things. The education system, and basic human needs like lunch, are completely different. Your remark comes off as you commodifying school lunches, treating it like a child’s basic human needs are even remotely comparable to voluntary non-school activities.
If you were to compare it rather to, band or drama or ballet class (extracurriculars) then I would actually say the point still completely stands for those too – such things can be vital to a child’s health, development, and social life, and to assign DEBT to participate in those activities is absurd and directly affects the students negatively. My school was one of the few in my area where it didn’t cost hundreds of dollars just to participate in band in middle and high school. And it still costed a lot of money to do things like marching band, because the program was underfunded! A majority of extracurricular funding goes to sports, specifically football, in most of the south, so programs like band had to have parents of students sponsor them for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and to do plenty of fundraising events, just to make it so we could function. Students still had to contribute a lot of money if they wanted to do specific things.
That’s just band, but there are many examples. That wasn’t my parent’s debt, that was my debt. When I had the opportunity to take AP tests and the like and potentially get scholarships, I was ashamed to do so in the fear that I might fail and waste my family’s money. And I’m still lucky in this regard, because many other kids can’t afford those things, and they can’t take on the debt because it prevents them from graduating. With the fucked state of financial aid/welfare in the US, many of those kids don’t even qualify to have those kinds of costs covered by the state, so at best they’re left in shame with the only other choice being to beg and hope that the people they go to aren’t dismissive or can help.
It is the student’s debt, practically. They get all the consequences and they’re treated like they’re responsible. If it wasn’t their debt, they wouldn’t be prevented from graduating their grade, or graduating high school, or being given proper nutrition, or doing extracurriculars.
Yeah, I know this is supposed to be “uplifting” news, but the fact that children’s lunch debt is a thing that exists in the richest country on earth is absolutely insane.
It’s freshly roasted and cut roast beef. The biggest difference between that and deli meat is that Arby’s serves the meat as soon as it has come out of the roaster, so they are hot sandwiches. The French Dip is pretty good.
It’s good for kids to see their parents providing for them - such as packing lunches for school. It emphasizes the truth that adult life is a series of mundane but important tasks, and that duty is also important.
You know what’s even better? Knowing that your society isn’t on the verge of collapse. The past few generations don’t seem to get to experience that one.
sorry but a ham sandwich and an apple aren’t even close to enough to be an apt meal for a child, for many kids school lunch is the most nutrition they get in a day and ripping that away from them is evil. the advice in your comment is terrible.
sliced meats sold in the US generally have EXTRAORDINARILY little nutrition, and are pretty expensive, while at the same time having a fuck ton of salt stuffed into them both for flavour and as preservatives. all you’re doing with a ham sandwich is wasting money to give your kids malnutrition and high blood pressure. sliced cheeses are less bad but they’re mostly salt and saturated fats still – and are still very little nutrition compared to the cost.
the most nutritious thing is the bread, but the most commonly bought bread slices are mostly just grains other than fiber, which while not necessarily a problem is still NOT something that can compensate for the lack of nutrition in the meal.
fruits are great and all but they’re only one part of our diets, it can be really difficult both money and time wise to do everything else. schools shouldn’t be ADDING on to that difficulty, they should be helping families with it instead.
but instead of that, our country is filled with people like you who choose to deflect from the issue of a dysfunctional social welfare system by pretending it’d be manageable if only it weren’t for those bad parents. i agree that most parents don’t deserve their kids, but it’s not always in their control, and regardless of that, whether or not a kid won the birth lottery is completely irrelevant to it – we should guarantee that ALL kids can, without shame and without punishment, get the food that they need to develop properly.
You’re going to need to provide the definition of nutrition that you are using.
Also if you’re angry at “apple and ham sandwich” you’re going to need to do the compared to what thing, and I guarantee you the content of the school lunches the kids’ parents failed to pay for would make you even angrier.
You are right on the last point. Parents should feed their kids.
I literally stated it in the comment. It’s clear I was talking about providing kids the food they need to develop properly and not suffer from malnutrition.
It’s not about “ham sandwich worse than nothing” it’s about the fact that you’re taking people’s shock and complaints, and immediately going to use these “ham sandwiches” to deflect from the issue of kids’ lunch debt being legal in the first place. And many of your comments under this post are just “actually it’s not technically the child’s debt”. You’re presenting parents not sending kids in with barely-meals as the problem.
The issue to focus on isn’t “the parents”. The blame often isn’t even on parents. The blame is on conservatives, on our society, on people who rail against the basic welfare that every civilized, developed, first-world country has.
As far as everyone else is concerned, you’re just trying to make excuses for the right causing our country’s dysfunction, and you’re trying to defend the existence of school lunch debt by using parents as a scapegoat and saying they’re the ones that really cause this.
Yes, and the vin diagram that shows the comparison between the people in that group and the people who shoot down federal help for free lunches is one circle.
Not gonna lie, it’s great that those kids got lifted out of debt. But who engineered the system to put kids in debt in the first place? Some moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash-esque figure, I presume?
That is flat-out heartbreaking. Why are there so many things higher on the list of priorities than feeding the nation’s children? I won’t drag out the usual suspects, but we have all heard of government expenditures that make far less sense than that.
As with most of this country’s problems, our particular flavor of Christianity (Puritans and Protestants) has lead to a culture where you have to earn things instead of everyone benefitting from a well-educated, healthy society.
They don’t care about life on Earth, they’re preoccupied with Heaven.
You see, here in America we have a thing called Freedom. Rather than have some weird socialistic thing where we actually feed our children when they’re at school, we think it’s better to teach 8 year olds the value of a dollar and let them go hungry because their parents can afford to pay for it.
So how are 8-year-olds supposed to understand the value of money if they don’t have the opportunity to earn it? In my country, we also have paid lunches at school, but this doesn’t help to improve children’s financial literacy. But when you work full time and get €500 a month, it instantly knocks the consumerist shit out of your head.
Ah you see,. you don’t have the level of freedom these kids have. They’re free to suffer and go hungry because their parents can’t afford lunches. They should know that their parents failed, and maybe that will kick their parents into gear to work harder.
I hope you know this is all 100% pure sarcasm. I loathe anyone who wants to block school lunches. I personally was on what they called “assisted lunch” program because my (single) mother was frequently behind on our lunch payments. “Assisted Lunch” was well known to be “poor people lunch”, where your friends would have pizza or tacos or something, and you get a peanut butter sandwich. They would call me up with the other poor kids in the middle of lunch to hand out our sandwiches. Fuck Republicans, Fuck Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds for denying kids their lunches, I will hold onto that resentment for my entire life.
I think it depends on the state and if it’s certain businesses like a family owned business or certain exceptions. I was delivering papers and mowing laws at 12 but that was in the 90s and it wasn’t to support me it was just on the weekends to have some money for video games, going to the movies, buy junk food, etc. I didn’t get a normal wage job until I was 16 working after school and weekends, and didn’t get a job that actually paid enough to support myself (with a roommate) until 19/20.
Can’t push private and charter schools if you’ve got good public schools. Richest fucking country in earth and somehow it seems like we can’t afford anything other than military. It’s ridiculous. I’m sure even if all the military money was redistributed we’d still find a way to get it into the hands of corporations while getting jack shit in return.
I keep wondering what’s gonna push the average Joe to the breaking point.
Honestly, there’s nothing uplifting about this and as a European I’m appalled by how such things as child debt can even exist in a country that claims to be “the best country in the entire world”. Classic Murrica…
Hey, we’re working on making this way more fair. Places like Kentucky are trying to repeal child labor laws so that they can at least pay these poor for profit lunch serving companies.
It’s because people misconstrue the debt all the time. The debt is for the kid’s lunches but it’s to the parents not the child. Unless it’s changed drastically since I was in school.
Also, the student is likely to get the meal even if they can’t afford it. Partly so they don’t get stigma from not being able to afford lunch, and partly because the kid still needs to eat.
Still, it shouldn’t cost money for a basic lunch. That’s another thing Republicans have been pushing for. No school lunches, free or otherwise.
There’s only three counties in Europe where this doesn’t happen - Finland, Estonia, and Sweden.
Yes 'merica bad but here in Europe we have many of the same issues they’re just not publicized as widely. Even the EU school fruit, veg and milk scheme is only subsidized if the member state chooses and most charge full price.
Respectfully, but what the actual fuck are you talking about? I grew up in the shittiest of shitty SE-European countries, and we had daily lunch coupons that we could spend at any restaurant, cafe, grocery store etc. I never once went hungry at school, or went into debt. The very concept would absolutely abhor every European person I know.
Yes, we have our own problems. Tons of them. Some very serious. But the safety and basic human rights/needs of children is absolutely not one of them.
Then name the country not all of Europe because you’re objectively wrong. I also grew up in Europe and we didn’t get meal tokens, if you want to go on the eu website they have various things explaining their school food programs and the current state of play.
As for you not knowing any Europeans that wouldn’t abhor the concept of parents paying for school meals you’re almost certainly mistaken, look at polling data we’re not living in a socialist utopia and pretending like we are only benefits right wing political parties
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