School Lunch Debt Essay

1025 Words5 Pages

Proposing a Solution: Increase In School Lunch Debt
After inflation has increased, several individuals are not able to eachfford essential needs. This is also a current issue in our local school districts along with numerous households. Due to the inflation increase, children may not be able to eat as much during school due to a few parents not having the ability to afford school lunches due to either increasing lunch prices or considering they do not qualify for free or reduced price lunches in Ohio. If students are not able to eat meals at school, then they are not meeting their required nutritional needs, which are essential for their development as well as their ability to focus on their education. The best possible solution to solve school …show more content…

Another solution that could be implemented to solve school lunch debt is by providing free meals. By providing free meals to students, they are able to have the exact meals as their peers, parents will not have to worry about finding the funds to pay for school lunches, moreover students are having their nutritional needs met, which is essential to their development. Despite how simple this may sound, this can easily impact local businesses as a result of a decline of how much product that is being sold. According to an article written by Denise-Marie Ordway, “Food purchases decline by an estimated $11 per month, on average, among households with children located in the same zip code as the school offering universal free meals” (Ordway, Section 16). Due to the fact that it wastes food, declines sales in grocery stores, and costs more taxes, this is another solution that is not the best for this particular issue, but can also be used as a potential solution in the …show more content…

The best solution to solve school lunch debt is by fundraising within the community. Regardless of how inconsistent this can be, this solution allows the community to be more involved. This is the best possible solution for the reason that fundraising would be beneficial to multiple children concurrently. Fundraising for existing school lunch debt also allows for children that have school debt to remain anonymous to prevent shame and embarrassment from their peers. This solution allows the community to become more well aware of school lunch debt in their district and why it is an issue for students with present or recurring debt and they are also allowed to take action and help out students with school debt. This solution also allows young community members to take responsibility and compose decisions. According to an interview conducted and written by Tayler Davis, “Me and all my friends realized that due to COVID, we have to have free lunches for all the students because some parents couldn’t support their kids,” McGrath explained. “So now that everything is going back to somewhat normal, the school doesn’t give free lunches anymore, so we noticed that and some kids had negative school lunch accounts.” (Davis, Lines 9-11). Davis writes about how they were throwing this fundraiser due to the fact that there was over 600 dollars of school debt the year before. This article also goes on to mention how a