S/O Food stamps- free school lunches

[Deleted]

DO you have any experience with them? Are they any good where you are?
Growing up I thought school lunch was pretty tastey. Now, not so much. I was looking at DS's menu that the school sent home for breakfast and lunch at school and, in my opinion, it is pretty bad. For example, what is a "Puppie Wrap" or a "Taco Nada"? Doesn't that mean nothing taco? That can't be good. And how about "Sweet Sticks with Chili Powder"? On the breakfast menu they have "Bean & Cheese Burrito and Cereal Assortment" and they have that combo pretty regularly. When did a bean and cheese become breakfast? I like bean & cheese burritos and would have liked to know this info. ; )
We do not qualify for free or reduced lunches but a majority of our school (70%) does. This year they decided to implement free breakfast for all students that want to get to school early to have it. I think it is important to make sure that kids have enough to eat but I am surious where the district got these menu ideas.

[Deleted]

I used to love the nachos when I was in elementary. We always had free lunch growing up and it was the tits.

I have no idea what it is now, but what you described sounds very odd. I get a potato and cheese burrito for breakfast. And really, sweet sticks and chili powder? I'm imagining cinnasticks sprinkled with chili powder.

[Miss Phryne Fisher]

I have never been anywhere that had a different lunch for those who purchased lunch and those who got free lunch. Maybe I am misunderstanding here?

[cjeanette]

Free lunch is the same as school lunch.

Unless you don't qualify and forget to put money on your kids lunch account. Then they feed him a cheese sandwich and a milk. Not that this happened to me once or anything.

[Deleted]

They serve the students the same food. But when I was a kid it was like $1.20/day per kid. My parents income qualified for free lunch. They didn't have to pay the $1.20/day cost. Which I imagine was nice when all 3 of us where in the same elementary.

[Deleted]

Where I lived, the lunch was the same whether it was free or not. I have no idea what the "system" was for it, because I don't think I knew anyone on free lunch. We paid for lunch in cash so someone not paying in cash would have caught my eye. I believe the amount of kids using free lunch was very low, though. I grew up in an affluent suburb- according to wiki, 2.4% of families were below the poverty line in 2000 and the median household income was over 100,000.

[cjeanette]

Dec 5, 2012 16:34:13 GMT -5 @iheartcosmos said:

Where I lived, the lunch was the same whether it was free or not. I have no idea what the "system" was for it, because I don't think I knew anyone on free lunch. We paid for lunch in cash so someone not paying in cash would have caught my eye. I believe the amount of kids using free lunch was very low, though. I grew up in an affluent suburb- according to wiki, 2.4% of families were below the poverty line in 2000 and the median household income was over 100,000.

When I was a kid we had cards they stamped. Yellow was regular, pink was reduced lunch, and orange was free. Which was a horrible system as I can very much remember the one kid who has orange and the one kid who had pink.

Now it is all electronic so there would be no way to know.

[Miss Phryne Fisher]

Yea now almost all kids use a PIN and nobody would know who is what anymore.

[Deleted]

It is the same lunch, free or not. Sometimes DS likes to money and buy lunch if there is something he likes. I check the menu to see if there is anything good that day and if so I will give him money for that day. Otherwise, I just send him to school with a lunch. Since we have weird food he usually buy once a month or so.
I just remember the lunches being we better than this stuff.

[Miss Phryne Fisher]

Dec 5, 2012 16:38:24 GMT -5 @forcuatro said:

It is the same lunch, free or not. Sometimes DS likes to money and buy lunch if there is something he likes. I check the menu to see if there is anything good that day and if so I will give him money for that day. Otherwise, I just send him to school with a lunch. Since we have weird food he usually buy once a month or so.
I just remember the lunches being we better than this stuff.

I would slap my mom for a piece of the Mexican Style Pizza we used to have. It was octagon shaped and amazingly delicious. Nothing like that anymore.

[Deleted]

When I was in school the free/reduced lunch kids had to leave class for a short time on Monday mornings to go get their lunch tickets. It was bad enough to have to use the tickets but it was made 1000x worse by the fact that me and maybe three other kids had to get up in the middle of class to go get them from the library each week.
At DS's school everyone just has an ID number that they use. I send DS with $ but if I didn't he would just give his number like the other kids and they would have an automated system call and let me know my balance. I just know I would forget to pay a balance so it is easier to give him a small envelope with $1.40 in it any time he wants to eat hot lunch.

[Deleted]

Dec 5, 2012 16:41:12 GMT -5 Miss Phryne Fisher said:

Dec 5, 2012 16:38:24 GMT -5 @forcuatro said:

It is the same lunch, free or not. Sometimes DS likes to money and buy lunch if there is something he likes. I check the menu to see if there is anything good that day and if so I will give him money for that day. Otherwise, I just send him to school with a lunch. Since we have weird food he usually buy once a month or so.
I just remember the lunches being we better than this stuff.

I would slap my mom for a piece of the Mexican Style Pizza we used to have. It was octagon shaped and amazingly delicious. Nothing like that anymore.

When I was in middle school we hade an option of getting a cinnamon roll every morning if we didn't want the daily meal option. That thing was freakin' awesome. It was huge, probably 4"x5" and they glazed them and you got either a white or chocolate milk and an apple or orange juice with it. Even if you paid it was only $1.25.
Sometimes when I am visiting my parent I try to think of a way that I can sneak on to a school campus or bride a student to get me one. They were amazing and began my love of cinnamon rolls.

[CloudBee]

Growing up you had to buy lucnh tickets. Full priced tickets were one color (blue?), reduced another (maroon?), and free lunch tickets were bright pink.

I felt so bad for the kids who had reduced or free tickets. I'm happy to hear it's all done electronically now.

[Deleted]

It's against federal regulations to give free or reduced students a different meal than full paid. It's actually against regulations to do anything at all that would somehow identify a student as being low income. It's called overt identification. We actually get audited by the state agency to make sure we're not doing anything that would let students or teachers know a student is free or reduced.

Some schools have a la carte lines and they are getting ready to pass a regulation saying you're not allowed to have any line that solely sells individual items. They consider that overt identification because supposedly only full-paying students will have money to go through that line.

Sometime's it's necessary for our cashiers to easily be able to identify free/reduced kids coming through the line. In our computer system, we used to have numbers by students names so our cashiers would know (1 = free, 2 = reduced, 3= paid), but we even had to stop doing that. Our computer program changed to where there used to be a comma between a child's first and last name (So "Last Name, First name" was free and "Last name First name" is full paying) but we can't do that either.

[definitelyO]

Free lunch - reduced cost lunch - $2.50/day lunch all eat the exact same thing. They don't make crappy lunches for the kids that can't pay.

we put money into an account for DS and the lunch lady just deducts the amount when he goes through the line. no cards or anything. you can bring cash - but otherwise no one would know if your lunch was free or reduced at his school.

Tomorrow's menu for DS is a choice of grilled cheese with tomato soup, pizza, turkey wrap or vegetable medly. side options: salad, fresh veggies: cucumber, celery, tomato, grapes, canned pineapple

[Deleted]

I never got hot lunch because it was too pricey ($1/day) & neither do my kids. But I went to private school for all but Jr. High...and I have no idea if/what kids had free lunch EXCEPT I think at my public Jr High the kids that worked hot lunch probably did. I know in HS for kids to get reduced tuition they worked--either lunch room, concession stands at games, the orchard, etc. I am guessing those who worked lunch got free lunch as part of it but I never asked even though one of my closest friends did it. I felt it was none of my business.

[Deleted]

I remember the tickets. Where I lived kids had no shame about it though. I remember kids would sell there lunch tickets in the hallway for $1.00 ( they were " worth" 1.50) so they could buy junk food ala carte. Lots of football players bought them so they could get 2-3 lunches cheaper. We were little capitalists lol.

[kadams767]

My family qualified for reduced price lunch when I was in elementary school. It was $0.25 instead of the $1.30 or whatever it normally cost. How it worked back then was that all of the kids' names that received free or reduced lunch were on a sheet that the cashier had. I had to give my name and my quarter and she would check off my name.

The food was OK. My parents didn't really let me buy it very often, both for nutritional reasons and the sad fact that sometimes, we didn't have the quarter. I can remember always wanting to buy lunch on the days they had spaghetti and meat sauce, tacos, or julienne salads. All the cool girls ate julienne salads.

[Deleted]

Our school has no meals whatsoever served. We are in an affluent area.

[panicked]

I remember the teacher taking attendance in elem. school and marking on the board who wanted hot lunch, which hot lunch you wanted (two choices or Pb&J) and if you were full price, reduced, or free. No one batted an eye at the reduced lunchers, but the free kids well, that was bad. In middle/high school, it was all on debit cards, so no one knew who paid what.

[knitty]

Dec 5, 2012 16:36:42 GMT -5 cjeanette said:

Dec 5, 2012 16:34:13 GMT -5 @iheartcosmos said:

Where I lived, the lunch was the same whether it was free or not. I have no idea what the "system" was for it, because I don't think I knew anyone on free lunch. We paid for lunch in cash so someone not paying in cash would have caught my eye. I believe the amount of kids using free lunch was very low, though. I grew up in an affluent suburb- according to wiki, 2.4% of families were below the poverty line in 2000 and the median household income was over 100,000.

When I was a kid we had cards they stamped. Yellow was regular, pink was reduced lunch, and orange was free. Which was a horrible system as I can very much remember the one kid who has orange and the one kid who had pink.

Now it is all electronic so there would be no way to know.

Really, only one of each? Our school is 30% FRL

[cjeanette]

Dec 5, 2012 18:41:30 GMT -5 knitty said:

Dec 5, 2012 16:36:42 GMT -5 cjeanette said:

When I was a kid we had cards they stamped. Yellow was regular, pink was reduced lunch, and orange was free. Which was a horrible system as I can very much remember the one kid who has orange and the one kid who had pink.

Now it is all electronic so there would be no way to know.

Really, only one of each? Our school is 30% FRL

I am sure there were more in the school but in the mass group of us that were there from K to 6 yes.

Why call me out and not the posters who said they had none?

Sent from my SPH-L710 using proboards

[heyrebekah]

Dec 5, 2012 16:48:00 GMT -5 @forcuatro said:

Sometimes when I am visiting my parent I try to think of a way that I can sneak on to a school campus or bride a student to get me one. They were amazing and began my love of cinnamon rolls.

LOL, I am imagining you lurking shiftily just beyond a chainlink fence. "Pssst, hey kid, yeah you..."

I am so old, I don't really remember anything about school lunches except that I used to buy little tiny things of chicken noodle soup and ice cream bars out of vending machines. In retrospect I suppose the school had an actual cafeteria with real food, but I only ever used the vending machines.

[RoxMonster]

The majority of students at our school qualify for free/reduced lunch. The stuff kids eat for lunch is disgusting though. I've had to do lunch duty and for many, they call a Snickers bar and soda a lunch. At our school, cheese (on french fries) is considered dairy and vegetables swimming in ranch dressing or another sauce are veggies. It's honestly HARD to get a healthy lunch from our cafeteria. Really you'd have to have a plain salad and just put a little dressing on it. Otherwise options are: ice cream, soft pretzels, candy, usually some sort of main meat dish like tacos, sausage pizza, etc.

ETA: Lunch is the same for the kids who pay and the kids who eat free.

[Deleted]

Dec 5, 2012 17:49:23 GMT -5 definitelyO said:

Tomorrow's menu for DS is a choice of grilled cheese with tomato soup, pizza, turkey wrap or vegetable medly. side options: salad, fresh veggies: cucumber, celery, tomato, grapes, canned pineapple

This would be nice. Everyone only gets one option and it is all or nothing. In addition to the menu items I posted at the beginning I will give tomorrow's. Fish tacos on a flatbread round, tater tots, side salad, and apple slices.

I think fish tacos are tasty but I don't know how well they will go over in an elementary school or how good they will be from a cafeteria.

[Deleted]

Dec 5, 2012 18:48:21 GMT -5 heyrebekah said:

Dec 5, 2012 16:48:00 GMT -5 @forcuatro said:

Sometimes when I am visiting my parent I try to think of a way that I can sneak on to a school campus or bride a student to get me one. They were amazing and began my love of cinnamon rolls.

LOL, I am imagining you lurking shiftily just beyond a chainlink fence. "Pssst, hey kid, yeah you..."

I am so old, I don't really remember anything about school lunches except that I used to buy little tiny things of chicken noodle soup and ice cream bars out of vending machines. In retrospect I suppose the school had an actual cafeteria with real food, but I only ever used the vending machines.

Don't think I wouldn't try it if I wasn't afraid of getting arrested for being a creepy person stalking a school.

I'm in my 30s and still remember eating cinnamon rolls when I was 13. My mom who is in her 50s went to the same middle school and she remembers then to. They are that good.

[hellonurse]

My kids usually prefer to pack their lunch, but eat at school occasionally. The school lunches here are awesome- there are always several fruit and veggie options, low-fat milk, entree salads as an option, etc.

[cajunmom]

At my kids' school they scan their fingerprint. No kids know who pays or who has free/reduced lunch because everyone goes through the line the same way. Parents put money into accounts and it's deducted automatically when the child goes through the lunch line.

[Deleted]

tjenbell I am so sorry that sounds horrible.

[UMaineTeach]

lunch entree yesterday:
a breadstick,
slathered in a mayo mustard compound that looked like butter,
wrapped in American cheese and deli ham

it looked
none of the kids ate it, just peeled it apart.
and they gobble the breadsticks when they aren't wrapped in mayo-mustard with sandwich insides on the outside

adding:
growing up the pay kids had tickets and the free kids just walked past the lady collecting tickets (saying 'Free' at the beginning of the year, but it was a small school and soon the workers knew who was free)

I do remember in elem. school helping friends in need steal lunch, they would ask if they could share your ticket, you would tear in in half and each put half in the can with the slot cut in it.

At the school I work at there is an ed tech at a computer who checks off each kid who is eating (again, small school you learn all the names quickly), you don't know who is paying and who is not.