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The Wyoming Valley West School District in Pennsylvania stirred up controversy in the wake of hundreds of letters sent to parents with lunch debt this week that reportedly warned them that their children could get sent to foster care if they didn’t pay up.
According to CNN, parents were informed that “multiple letters sent home with your child” had previously been sent yet no payments had followed.
The letter went: “Your child has been sent to school every day without money and without breakfast and/or lunch.” It also warned that should parents continue to refuse to provide food for their children, the Dependency Court may step in.
“If you are taken to Dependency court, the result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care,” the letter read.
The school has not replied to requests for comment but the institution is supposedly owed more than $22,000. WNEP reported that more than 1,000 letters had been sent and caused an uproar in Luzerne County near Scranton and even made national headlines.
There is nothing in Wyoming Valley’s Cafeteria Purchase Charging and Insufficient Funds Policy that says parents may get sent to court or that they give up their children. However, those families whose student account reaches at least negative $10 will get “an automated call every Friday until the account” is paid off.
Joseph Muth, the director of federal programs for the school district, was identified as the one who penned the letter. Muth clarified that the letter was a “last resort” citing the more than $22,000 the district was owed by around 1,000 students. Four of those parents even owed more than $450 each.
Muth added that students with delinquent accounts may be served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as an option.
Since foster care was mentioned, the Luzerne County Children and Youth Services got dragged into the controversy. The agency’s head, Joanne Van Saun, decried the weaponization of her agency to gain leverage on the families.
“We exist to protect and preserve families. The only time a child is taken out is when they cannot be maintained safely in their home,” she said. “Our agency has helped many children and families with paying rent and buying clothes. We know children do better when they’re with their families.”
In addition, the school district’s letter made the job of Van Saun’s staff harder because people are usually already irate by the time her agency gets involved.
“We’re really there to help, and not destroy, their family,” she said.
While she admitted that the working relationship between the school district and her agency is generally good, the letter had still “blindsided” her.
“The way they handled it was totally inappropriate, unnecessary and could’ve easily been resolved through so many different avenues,” she said.
Van Saun wrote a letter to the district’s superintendent saying, “The Luzerne County Children and Youth Foster Care System is NOT utilized to scare families into paying school lunch bills.”
For all the controversy generated by the Pennsylvania district, they were not the first to be accused of what is now known as “lunch shaming.”
In May, a Rhode Island school district also triggered an uproar when they announced that students with unpaid lunch balances will instead get sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch until their balance was settled. Yogurt company Chobani decided to intervene by paying off the majority of the $77,000 debt.
One Minnesota high school even tried to prevent students with lunch debt from attending the graduation ceremony.
Lunch debt is increasingly becoming a problem. Per the School Nutrition Association, 40.2% of school districts that had unpaid lunch debts reported an increase in the number of students who lacked adequate fund compared to last school year.