NEWS: Poor Parents? Suffer the Children!

CULTURE: Poor Parents? Suffer the Children!

Ah, school lunch: perennial provider of substandard food and social misery. And now one school has found a way to combine them both into a one-two punch of demoralizing hell.

According to the LA Times, officials at Chula Vista Elementary school have instituted a new policy: students whose parents fail to pay their lunch tab are denied access to the cafeteria-created culinary delights. Instead, they have the less than appetizing choice of a cold, plastic-wrapped cheese sandwich or... nothing. Just a cheese sandwich, that's it.

The policy came about after years of shitty parents not paying their lunch debts, and to that aim, the strategy has worked:

No shit. Want to find out who the poor kids are? Oh, right, they eat cheese sandwiches. But the lunch ladies don’t discriminate; you can be loaded, but if your delinquent 'rents miss a lunch payment, it’s cheese fucking sandwich for you. Hey, you’re poor and vegan? Fuck you, eat your cheese.

Yeah, don’t hang out with the cheese-eaters, their farts probably stink. The schools insist this is a last resort for parents who don’t pay: they send letters, use collection agencies, and “put stickers on children’s hands.” But when all else fails, the cheese sandwich awaits. One verbose tot had this to say about his crappy lunch:

I feel you, brother. What I don’t understand is if parents aren’t paying their lunch tab, why doesn’t the school do away with the “tab” altogether? I sure as shit paid cash-money for every school lunch I ever ate. I guess the argument is that kids will get pummeled for their lunch money, but hey, I’d gladly take an occasional beating instead of eating an ungrilled, unappettizing, sweaty cheese sandwich for 36 weeks straight.

And here's a barely related video that, if nothing else, will remind you how stupid a cheese sandwich is.

OK, this is really a glass half-empty view. Really, people should be looking at it as "free cheese sandwich!"

I was a free lunch kid. Until I quit eating lunch. Because I was cool. And I got sick of soybeans. But mostly because of the soybeans. I was mostly never cool. What was I talking about again?

Gah, but it must really suck to be the cheese sandwich kid.

Man, being in college now, there are some days I would KILL for a free cheese sandwich. Lucky poor kids...

whether you get a free lunch or not, the other kids are gonna know your a poor kid. I used to get a free meal for a couple of years of school because my father was layed off, it sucked , but eating a shitty free meal with real friends, is still better than eating a great meal with asshole snobs.

dude...at least give them PB&J that used to be what they'd give us back in elementary when we forgot our lunch money.

as a lunch lady, i hafta say thats better than what they do in the school i work at. the kids have a lunch program where they can pay with cash or they have accounts where the parents send checks and with every lunch bought the ammount is debited from the kids accounts. at the begining of the school year they let kids slide for not having money but there were kids who abused that and who never repaid there debts. now there not allowed to 'charge' there lunches if they dont have money. they still have kids who get free lunch which is whatever special they serve that day, a fresh made sandwich or pizza. but if your not a free kid and you dont have money your beat. so those kids should be happy they get a cheese sandwich.

They won't give PB&J because they already tried that approach and the kids liked it too much, so no one paid their bills.

I think instead of cheese sandwiches the kids should have to spend five minutes in the closet with Jimmy the pedophile. That'll really teach those fucking parents.

Reminds me of that Chris Rock bit:
"We don't need prayer in school! We need the tossed salad man in school, that'll straighten the kids out! 'Hey Jimmy, you got a D, you know what you gotta do?' 'Nooooo!'"

This non-sequitur brought to you by the letter A and the number 4.

I say to these children and their delinquent parents.

Boo fucking hoo

"But they don't have the money!"

I have less and less tolerance for people every day.

Edit: I suck at html tags.

Fuck, I ate cheese sandwiches for lunch from pre-school up through elementary. Sure, I wasn't the most popular kid. But I don't see what the fuckign big deal is. They served cheese sandwiches for lunch at my high school like twice a week.

My school did that, too. Gnarly PB&J on stale bread.

the tone of this article is fucking hilarious.

a cheese sandwich ? doesn't sound too fun if you're always poor... but hey, cheese is good ! Or so they say...

But yeah, I remember we had free lunches if we didn't had money, we'd get the day's special. I still remember one day when they even asked the principal to come see me cause they didn't believe I had a lunch... all because I was buying a pastry and chocolate chip cookies ! Hey, I liked my fresh cookies, and I wanted to buy em before they ran out !

The poor kids get free lunch. The ones that "forget" to bring money get the cheese.

At least they're giving the kids something. When I was in elementary school, if you didn't have a lunch or the cash to pay for it, you were SOL and didn't get to eat that day.

I don't think it's necessarily a good idea for schools to punish kids for their parents' inattention to detail (or inability to pay). But seriously, as punishments go, this is fucking mild.

Bam! Same here. I definitely went hungry a few days because I forgot to bring lunch money.

Wish I had had a cheese sandwich back then.

I think my highschool was like that... minus the cheese sandwich part. We had lunch cards and they would let us slide every now and then, as long as we paid later. If we didn't pay, we didn't get eat. They still had a free lunch program for poorer kids, which I was on when I was younger. Once I started getting money for lunch, I quit eating and kept the money for me.

That's usually how we got money when we were kids.
Imagine now... If i was given lunch money, I'd definatly get the lunch. I've spent alot of time hungry and know it sucks.

And after puplic humiliation fails as a bullying tactic they send a large ex boxer to beat the money out of the dead beat parents.