Massachusetts School Out-Horribles Everyone By Ensuring Poor Kids Starve, For Freedom
Remember just a few scant months ago when we got mad at Missouri? Oh, sorry. We've probably been mad at Missouri for one thing or another several times of late, because Missouri. But one time we got mad at Missouri because they let horrible private vendors run their school lunches, and said horrible private vendor fired a worker for having the goddamn temerity to feed one of the urchins an actual nutritious lunch instead of the poor-kid-all-dairy-cheese-and-milk lunch? We thought we were pretty much at peak outrage over horrible things that could be done to poor schoolchildren as far as holding their meager food hostage. NOPE. Attleboro Massachusetts goes H.A.M. and makes sure that kids get no fucking food at all:
As many as 25 students at Coelho Middle School were denied meals or told to throw their lunches away Tuesday because they could not pay or their pre-paid accounts did not contain enough money, school officials said today...
Parents said they were told by their children that some pupils in the cafeteria line had already picked up their lunch and were told at the checkout they had to throw it away.
Victoria Greaves, 11, a fifth grader at Coelho, said a cashier told her to throw away her lunch because there was not enough money in her account. She said she threw her meal away and got nothing to eat.
What is this we don't even. These people LITERALLY took the already-existing food out of poor kids' hands by making them throw it away. How is this even a thing, America?? There's a predictable circular firing squad about how it wasn't the school's fault it was the vendor's fault it wasn't the vendor's fault it was the school's fault, but you know what? We do not care! We give no fucks whatsoever for that explanation, because someone, somewhere, figured that the right thing to do was to pry food away from poor kids' warm not-dead hands, because wasting food is more better than giving kids food if they can't pay.
We don't even have anything else to say about this, snark-wise, because terrible reality has far outstripped our abilities to hyperbolize, and that's saying something. Can we just say, though: Why can't we send vendors like this to, you know, the Pentagon? "What's that, your pre-paid account for fighter jets has run out and you're borrowing money to pay for them? NO FIGHTER JETS FOR YOU. THROW THEM AWAY." And this way, only lawn ornaments go hungry.
[ Sun Chronicle ]
Empathy, Sociopathy. So easy to get the two confused!
The ever-fucked Austerity Chicken is going to lay such a wonderful egg, don't you think?
This is simply appalling - no child should be forced to throw food away because the computer says they don't have the money to pay for it. You served it, they eat it, you take the loss on your ledger sheet and then work it out to fix the problem. The problem is that the blame will be directed at the parents for not having the precognitive ability to know when their kid's lunch balance was low. Not at the vendor for having an obviously asinine policy, nor at the school district for essentially handing control over to an outside vendor without making it clear that letting kids starve is not an acceptable option.