As an education blogger at least once or twice a month I see a story about lunch debt. The last one I remember was about some boy who saved up enough of his personal money to pay off some his classmates’ lunch debt. This story was shared from a site that specializes in “positive” news stories with the caption “faith in humanity restored.”

I have to say that I never actually lost my “faith in humanity” but if I had, a story about a boy who scrounged together enough funds to cover meals for his friends wouldn’t bring it back. Don’t get me wrong; it is objectively a positive story and the boy deserves some recognition, but I can’t get past the concept of lunch debt to begin with.

Lunch debt should not be a thing … in any country, much less one with an advanced economy and compulsory education. The United States of America is rich enough to provide lunch to every student in public education. Thankfully, some states have realized that and started to move in that direction.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, only students who were classified as “low income” would qualify for free or reduced lunch. One of the few positives to come out of coronavirus pandemic was additional money and relaxed regulations that allowed states to feed every single student. Now that the COVID era money and policies have dried up, some states want to continue the free meals.

Massachusetts, Nevada, and Vermont have free meals at least for this year while California and Maine have made their free meals permanent. Colorado voters approved universal free lunch via the ballot box and similar efforts are under way in North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, and Maryland.

There is no need to wax poetic about the need for students to eat. Everyone knows that meals are important and kids who miss them perform worse in school. Additionally, if students are struggling to pay for lunch at school then chances are their parents are struggling to pay for dinner at home, meaning school lunch might be their only meal of the day. The idea that a hungry child, a minor, would incur debt from eating at school is asinine.

Education is mandatory in this country. How can the state charge students to eat at a place where they are legally required to be? Compare this to other functions of government: The government provides meals to members of the military especially in deployed locations because we recognize that when troops are required to be somewhere food will need to be provided as well. Why don’t we recognize this with students?

As much as it warms my heart to hear about a child scraping together their allowance money to pay off lunch debt for their classmates I would just as soon like to never see it again. There is nothing positive about children performing functions that should be carried out by a government.