Connections: Hunger Games

Suppose you’re a kid in one of the East Hampton School District’s three schools on a particular day this fall. Suppose you don’t usually get breakfast at home, and you’re hungry when you get on line for lunch. Friends on line are opting for whatever the main offering is, maybe spaghetti or pizza, and some also ask for and get a cookie or other snack.

But when your turn comes — uh, oh — you’re not allowed to have any of these things. Like the other kids, you have a NutriKids card, through which parents pre-pay for meals. When your card is swiped, however, it shows the cafeteria workers that your account is delinquent. You are told you can choose only one of three things: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a cheese sandwich, or a bagel with cream cheese. Nothing else and nothing more. Your friends around you are watching. What do you do? How do you feel?

The East Hampton School Board adopted a policy this year that, at the heart of it, penalizes students for their parent or guardian’s transgression of not paying up for foods their kids charged last year. School board members say the policy is justified: After all, they note, they cut $1 million from the budget approved in May and are running a tight ship. And, they would argue, parents have been given plenty of time to pay what they owe.

About $17,000 was outstanding for school meals at the end of the academic year in June, and, following what is reported to have been a concerted effort to get the outstanding bills paid, that figure was brought down to $6,300 by the opening of school this year. Board members say the new policy is necessary, and fair.

The only thing they don’t seem to be taking into account, or taking seriously, is the potential for a student to be humiliated in front of peers — and the lesson the policy teaches: That children deserve to be punished for their elders’ misdeeds.

One school board member told me she was confident that those still delinquent this month were, in most cases, perfectly able to pay up. She also reported that in some cases a social worker had been asked to find out if any hardship was involved in late payment.

Still, all this doesn’t sit right with me. Regardless of the frustration unpaid bills must cause the district’s accountants, taking it out on the kids is unacceptable.

Providing meals for the some 1,800 students in the East  Hampton schools is a mind-boggling challenge, I am sure, even though the district contracts with an outside firm to handle it. The bookkeeping involved in allotting free or reduced-price meals to those who qualify is undoubtedly complex. I trust that the school board is satisfied the district is handling these tricky jobs well. And, using NutriKids takes any stigma away from those whose meals are subsidized.

There are places, however, where the hard-nosed tactics of the marketplace do not belong and the breakfast and lunch program is one of them. The district’s 2014-15 budget came to more than $65 million. Sixty-five million! That throws the delinquent $6,300 into its proper context, and it’s a pretty piddling amount, don’t you think?

Let’s take a minute to remind ourselves that there are people living among us who — out of political conviction or out of a sense of honor or out of sheer embarrassment — would never seek public assistance or even admit they need it. This means that there undoubtedly are students whose only opportunity for a full, proper meal is at school. It’s the district’s responsibility, and our community’s responsibility, to see that they get it, and that they get it with their dignity intact.