This week, Stafford in Action is coming to the aid of students’ families who are struggling to pay for school lunches.
That families are stressed financially is well-known. But truly understanding that stress can be harder to quantify.
Stafford County Public Schools, however, can measure that stress with two numbers: 4,000, and $100.
The first number represents the total number of students who are carrying some debt for school lunches. The second number is the average debt each student’s family is carrying. That means that more than 1 in 10 families in Stafford is struggling with paying for their children’s school lunches.
According to Acting Superintendent Chris Fulmer, last year the “cumulative balance across our division was growing at the rate of $20,000 to $30,000 a month to where [at] the end of June 2023 we were approaching $500,000 in total meal debt.”
The total debt load is now down to about $360,000, and this week the school system to hoping to lower that number significantly through its Stafford in Action program.
Why Did Student Lunch Debt Soar?
If there were some good that came out of the pandemic, it was for a time the unburdening of families to pay for school lunches. For two years, federally funded free school lunches were available for all public-school children.
When that program ended in 2022, however, Virginia schools had no option but to go back to the pre-pandemic business-as-usual approach. Students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch continued to receive them. But everyone else was required to begin paying again.
A series of unfortunate circumstances then unfolded.
Nikki Jackson, who is the school system’s coordinator for family and community engagement, explained that some parents simply weren’t aware of the change. “There was a misunderstanding with parents that had relied for the better part of two years on free lunches, and then all of a sudden that went away.”
She also notes that Stafford has a no-shaming policy. Under these guidelines, when a student comes through the lunch line but there isn’t enough money to cover the cost of lunch, the school gives the student the full lunch. In this way, Jackson said, “you [didn’t] know [your student was] accruing a debt until it’s already happened.”
There were also challenges around communicating that debt to the families.
Maureen Siegmund, who is the Garrisonville School Board representative and board chair, told the Advance that there are limits on the ways debts can be communicated to families. “We cannot send a letter directly home with the students…. We have to communicate directly with the parent.”
She also noted that parents were so accustomed to having their students’ meals paid for, when they did get a notification that they owed $10 or $20, they often felt this was mistake and didn’t act on it.
And finally, there’s the reality that Stafford has many kids whose families fall “in the gap,” she said. They don’t qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and they’re “struggling to afford to pay down the debt they’ve either accrued already, or to continue to provide meals to their students throughout the day.”
Maya Guy, who’s the Acquia School Board Representative and board vice chair, said that it’s also true parents didn’t truly understand where the money to pay for the debt might come from.
“Sometimes parents would get the email” and recognize they owed the money, she said. But “they never thought past where that money [to cover that debt] comes from. Once we started speaking about it more and more, and engaging the community with ‘If you guys don’t pay this debt we’re forced to pay it from things that are still taking it from the schools.’”
Once we explained this debt has to be paid from district’s operating budget, Guy said, people understood the important and began to pay those debts a bit quicker.
Getting the Community Involved
Beyond communicating with families and raising awareness of the burden this debt was placing on the schools’ operating budget, the district is working with the local business community in Stafford to try and get this debt paid down.
This is not so much about alleviating “the burden off Stafford Schools,” Fulmer told the Advance. “Our goal is to relieve the burden off these families because they’re the ones carrying this debt. Some of them are trying to pay this debt down. The more we can pay it down and get them ahead of the game for this current school year so they don’t have as much insecurity is really our goal.”
Fulmer notes that since June 2023, when the debt total reached $490,000, about $130,000 has been paid down thanks to parents paying their students’ debts down, and donations from the community.
Beginning this week, the business community is helping out by offering customers the opportunity to contribute toward students’ school lunches.
“The ask for our businesses,” Jackson said, “was to do a $3 POS add-on to support students in need in Stafford Schools. That gives anyone in our community a chance to do a small part and make a big difference in the life of a student. Businesses can also sponsor classrooms at $100 a piece, and sponsor schools at a higher quantity.”
The offer runs from today — September 23 — through Friday September 27.
The fundraising drive then culminates at Stafford’s Via Colori festival on Saturday and Sunday, September 28-29, at Stafford Regional Airport.
Take Part
When eating out this week in Stafford, visit the Stafford in Action site to learn about the participating restaurants in the POS fundraising effort.
If you’re a business that wants to get involved, it’s not too late. Simply email Stafford Schools here.
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