Utah School Seizes Lunches From Elementary Students In Debt, Throws Them In Trash

80049590Forty elementary school students at Uintah Elementary School in Salt Lake City had their lunches seized and thrown in the trash because their parents were behind on payments. I don’t even have words for how awful this is. These people should be ashamed of themselves. And fired.

Jason Olsen, a Salt Lake City District spokesman, said the district’s child-nutrition department became aware that Uintah had a large number of students who owed money for lunches.

As a result, the child-nutrition manager visited the school and decided to withhold lunches to deal with the issue, he said.

Apparently, cafeteria workers weren’t able to see which students owed money until they were given their lunches. Once food is served to a child it can’t be given to someone else, so they then took the meals and threw them away. The kids were given fruit and milk to replace the lunches that were thrown in the trash. Can I just repeat again that adults who presumably possess the power of critical thinking, took food out of multiple children’s hands and dumped it in the trash. One of the kids told her mother that she saw a cafeteria worker cry at the sight of what was happening.

“This can be easily prevented,” Olsen said. “We need to make sure proper notification goes out to the parents and they have time to put money in the accounts.”

But Olsen said he would not describe the tactic as a mistake.’

He wouldn’t describe it as “a mistake?” What would he call it then? I have a few ideas; unbelievably cruel, heartless, lacking total foresight and freaking awful. It was terrible that people were given the order to do this.

I understand schools need to be paid, but there is always a better way than humiliating a student and making him or her go hungry. One of the students reportedly went home and made lunches for all the students she knew that had theirs taken. If the district would have showed as much humanity as an 11-year-old, this never would have happened in the first place.

(photo: Getty Images)

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