Say ''Cheese'' If You Don't Pay for Lunch

When I was young I went to a public elementary school. Lunch was forty cents. Sometimes my mother gave me exact change. I remember carefully checking throughout the morning that my quarter, nickel and dime were still in my pocket. There were times that she wrote out a check and I had a punch card for my lunches. There were red cards and blue cards. For a long time it didn't even occur to me to ask why there were two different colors of cards. One day in third grade I was standing next to my friend who had a blue card. I asked her why hers was blue when mine was not since we were in the same grade, same class etc. She told me that her card was free. That was all. No entitlement or embarrassment (that I could sense).

While I read about the school in Albuquerque , New Mexico that has begun to hand out cheese sandwiches to those children who owe the school for lunches. Parents cry out. Some to say thank you because tax payers grow weary of picking up the tab. Other parents of course are angry. The entitled ones are so quick to pipe up and complain. They call the school and radio stations crying out that this punishes their children for being poor. They should be thanking the school system for feeding their child lunch and then buck up and take more parental responsibility. If they don't have money for school lunch and they are not eligible for reduced or free lunches then they could see if they are eligible for food stamps, WIC, commodities or even visit a food bank and make their child lunch. Of the complainers I would love to know how many have cable, cell phones, internet access and luxuries of that sort when they proclaim to not be able to provide their own child lunch.

Being singled out in school or seeming different from your peers is never fun but instead of blaming the school and spending time protesting the fact that someone fed your child for free maybe the parents in debt for lunches could pay off that debt by volunteering at the school. Given that option (that none of the complainers seemed to come up with) how many would work to pay off that lunch money owed? The amount of unpaid lunches in Albuquerque last year came to $130,000. That is a staggering amount of unpaid lunches.

We were not rich by any means when I was growing up but we made do. My mother did without and her children came first. Necessities came before luxuries and we didn't always get what we wanted but we did get what we needed. My friend with the blue card? She grew up without much money but she never complained about it. Striving for more without wanting it to be handed to us can make us stronger. We went all through school together and she became a doctor.