ACROSS AMERICA — Keoni Ching is only 8, but the Vancouver, Washington, boy grasps the magnitude of an often-hidden problem in America: Too many children can’t afford their school lunches.
These aren’t kids whose families who qualify for free- and reduced-price lunches, according to the School Nutrition Association, a national nonprofit whose 55,000 members run school meal programs.
Three-fourths of U.S. school districts reporting to the group had unpaid student meal debt in the 2017-18 school year, and the median amount of unpaid meal debt per district has gone up 70 percent since the 2012-13 school year, according to a recent report.
“Students can’t hear their teachers over the sound of a growling stomach,” Gay Anderson, the president of the School Nutriton Association, said in a statement.
Anderson’s organization supports universal free lunches as a basic component of learning, as important as “textbooks and pencils,” she said.
Unless — or until — that happens, it takes kids like Keoni Ching to recognize and address the problem. Selling keychains $5 at a time, the Benjamin Franklin Elementary School student raised $4,105 to wipe out lunch debt at his school and six others.
Keoni borrowed heavily from San Francisco 49ers and former Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, who has written checks to clear $27,000 in school lunch debt, for the project for his school’s “Kindness Week.”
Keoni loves keychains and likes how they look dangling from his backpack, so he hit on the idea of selling custom keychains to his classmates.
The idea caught on.
“We have sent keychains to Alaska, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Arizona — all over the country,” Keoni’s mother, April Ching, told CNN. “There was one lady who said she wanted $100 worth of keychains so that she could just hand them out to people. … There were several people who bought one keychain and gave (Keoni) a hundred bucks. It was absolutely amazing how much support the community showed for his whole project.”
Lunches at the school are affordable at $2 a pop, “but if you have two or three kids and for whatever reason, you’ve missed (paying for) a week of lunch or breakfasts, that adds up pretty quickly,” Woody Howard, the principal at Keoni’s school, told CNN. “This type of a gift takes a little bit of pressure off of your family.”
Keoni went far beyond what was expected during Kindness Week, Howard said.
“He wanted to do something that was kind, and he started it outside of Kindness Week,” he told news station KATU. “So it really turned into a situation where he is taking an act of kindness and then doing it year-round.”
1 In 6 Kids Don’t Have Enough To Eat
Rising school lunch debt is symptomatic of a larger problem. In the first report of its kind last year, Feeding America said 13 million American children are hungry and don’t know where they’ll get their next meal.
That’s one in six children, according to Feeding America, a national nonprofit that operates a network of 200 local food banks that feed more than 46 million people.
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Local schools do what they can to ease the situation, sometimes by filling backpacks with food and sending them home with kids on weekends.
“We’re talking about really hungry kids — the ones who look forward to getting that backpack of food to take home for the weekend,” Anderson, the School Nutrition Association president, told Patch last year for a report on the Feeding America report. “I’ve heard many times, ‘Oh my gosh, look what we get,’ and seen the excitement in knowing they’re going to have some food to eat.”
When kids are hungry, learning suffers.
Stacks of published research show that children who don’t have enough to eat have lower test scores and overall academic achievement, and they are more likely to skip school, have to repeat a grade or not finish school at all. They’re also more likely to suffer chronic health conditions such as anemia and asthma, require hospitalization and suffer oral health problems. Hungry kids also are prone to fighting, hyperactivity, aggression, anxiety, mood swings and bullying.
“‘Hangry’ is a real thing,” Annelise Cohon told Patch last year for the story about hungry children. Cohon leads the Partners for Breakfast in the Classroom program for the NEA Foundation, the National Education Association’s charity.
“Kids who are food insecure and hungry are more likely to act out, be discipline problems and find it harder to concentrate when a basic need isn’t being met,” she said. “The impact of hunger can be felt throughout the life cycle for a student.”
Schools Have To Collect Lunch Debt
In schools across America, philanthropists — sometimes young ones like Keoni Ching, other times celebrities like Richard Sherman and at other times, churches — are stepping in to pay off meal debt.
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Schools are required under federal rules that took effect two years ago to attempt to collect the meal debt and are barred from using federal education dollars to erase it.
As debt collectors, they’ve stumbled some, sparking a national debate on “lunch shaming.”
Last fall, the cafeteria staff at a 9-year-old Ohio boy’s school took away his cheesy breadsticks because his meal account was in arrears. He was new to the district, but his application for federal government meal assistance hadn’t quite caught up with him when he enrolled in his new school.
“When I was going to check out, the lunch lady didn’t say anything, took away my cheesy breadsticks and sauce, put them over there, and took out bread on cheese from the fridge and put it on my tray,” the boy told news station WEWS.
The policy nudging schools to go after kids with balances on their school meal accounts drew nationwide outrage. Last fall, California Gov. Gavin Newsom made public shaming over lunch debts against the law, effectively skirting the federal regulation.
The law, sponsored by state Sen. Robert Hertzberg, not only says California students can’t be denied a meal of their choice if they have unpaid lunch charges, but also makes clear “that the pupil is not shamed or treated differently from other pupils.”
Newsom said when he signed the law in September that he was touched by the story of Ryan Kyote, a 9-year-old Napa, California, boy who used his allowance to pay off the $74.50 his third-grade classmates owed for school lunches after he saw a story about a 5-year-old girl who was denied lunch because she couldn’t pay for it.
“He said, ‘Nobody should have to buy their lunch at school,” Ryan’s mother told CBS News. “We should just have lunch together, because we’re friends, and that’s what they do.”
Newsom credited Ryan’s “empathy and courage” in spotlighting a problem that singles out kids whose parents are struggling financially. He credited the boy’s empathy and courage.
“He showed how at many schools across the country, students whose parents are not able to pay for their lunch are given a cheaper, ‘alternative’ lunch that causes them to stick out from their peers,” Newsome said in a statement after signing the bill.
In Vancouver, Washington, Keoni Ching doesn’t think of himself as a social or political activist.