No child should ever go hungry because they do not have the money to pay for school food. Frankly, no child should have to pay for school lunch. CBS News has a report about a Seattle father, moved by stories of “lunch shaming,” who set up a GoFundMe page in the hopes of erasing some of the “lunch debt” at his son’s school. In a few days Jeffrey Lew had been able to get the money needed to erase the lunch debt of the elementary school children going to school with his child. He decided to try crowdsourcing another debt—the largest K-12 school district in Washington, Seattle Public Schools.
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Lew called the district and asked them how much they owed. They gave him a number: $20,531.79, which would cover the lunch debt at all 99 schools within the district.
The amount was higher than Lew expected, but it didn't deter him.
He quickly got to work, posting links to his fundraising campaign on local Facebook pages and asking parents if they would be interested in donating. Within 24 hours, Lew raised $500. Over the weekend, the funds grew to nearly $3,000.
As of this diary, Lew’s GoFundMe page has raised over $25,000 of its $30,000 goal. Lew says any excess money will go to another school district for the same purpose. This is great work and should be supported and applauded; but we all know that the real solution is to do away with the “free market” in our children’s public schools. Learning how “unfair the world is” by shaming and starving children is the definition of moral bankruptcy.