No free lunch: Donors come forward to erase students’ debts
Ashley C. Ford felt driven to act by a sad fact of life in the nation’s school cafeterias: Kids with unpaid lunch accounts are often embarrassed with a substitute meal of a cold cheese sandwich and a carton of milk.
Ford, a New York City writer, appealed to her 66,000 Twitter followers with a solution. “A cool thing you can do today is try to find out which of your local schools have kids with overdue lunch accounts and pay them off.”
In the nearly two months since, people around the country have been inspired to donate thousands of dollars to erase debts owed by parents that can follow kids throughout their school careers.
In Minnesota, an online fundraising effort has paid almost $100,000 in lunch debt in Minneapolis schools and $28,000 in St. Paul’s. Donors, mostly anonymous, erased $6,000 in debts in Topeka, Kansas, $2,000 in Bellevue, Washington, $1,200 in Wilmington, Delaware, and $900 in Herminie, Pennsylvania.