If you are an adult and you tell a hungry kid they have to dump their lunch in the garbage because they’re 5 cents short — you’re a horrible person.
Students at an Attleboro, Massachusetts, middle school went hungry this week, if they had a negative balance on their pre-paid lunch cards.
Five cents of debt was enough for cafeteria employees at the Coehlo Middle School to instruct kids at least one day this week to dump out the food they would have normally eaten, CNN affiliate WJAR in Rhode Island reported.
About 25 children left the lunchroom with empty stomachs, said Whitson’s Culinary Group in a statement. The company runs the school’s cafeteria.
Actually, if you tell anyone that they have to throw their food in the garbage and go hungry because they’re a few cents shorts — you’re a dick.
Meanwhile, legislators in Tennessee are pushing a bill to make Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) dependent upon the grades of children who benefit from it.
The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.
Children of poor families are already at a severe disadvantage in academia relative to children from middle and upper class families, and linking welfare to their performance in school is equivalent to twisting the knife after it’s already been jabbed in.
The fact that few very people in America have children of school age may make it easy to propose punishing someone else’s kids because their parents are poor, but that doesn’t make it right and it qualifies you to be counted among the world’s worst persons.