A School Cafeteria Worker Quits Job Over School's ‘Lunch Shaming’ Policy
By Timfly
A school employee from Pennsylvania is getting a lot of attention on social media after she posted on Facebook about what she witnessed happening in the elementary school lunchroom where she worked. The repeated incidents upset her so much that she quit her job and decided to go public in order to let parents and the community know exactly what was happening to their children.
Stacy Koltiska, who worked at an elementary school in the Canon McMillan School District for two years, told KDKA some students are being denied hot lunches to force parents to pay for overdrawn lunch accounts. Many people are calling the policy “lunch shaming” because of the embarrassment it causes the child to be singled out for their parent’s mistake.
The new policy requires the students in kindergarten through sixth grade who have more than a $25 negative balance on their lunch accounts to be given a plain cheese sandwich rather than a hot lunch tray. Kids in seventh through twelfth grade get no lunch at all.
Just a few weeks into the school year, Stacy had already been forced to take a lunch tray away from two young children, and it broke her heart to the point that she decided to leave her job and take a stand against the new policy. Stacy told CBS Pittsburg what it was like to take one little boy’s food tray away. “His eyes welled up with tears. I’ll never forget his name, the look on his face,” she recalled. The worst part is that after it was taken away from the child, the food then had to be thrown away.
Stacy decided to take a stand and left the job that she’d had for over two years. She then posted on Facebook to let parents in the Canon-McMillan school district know just how far the district was willing to go in order to collect overdue lunch money. Once the shares on Stacy’s post began to gain momentum, local news got in touch with her to get her story in a face to face interview.
Of course the school needs parents to send lunches or to keep up with paying for their children’s school lunches, but to humiliate the child in order to extort payment from the parents is outrageous. There is a better way to handle the situation, and the Canon-McMillan school district and any other who has similar policies need to find a solution that doesn’t involve shaming innocent children.
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