Campaign Action
Michigan’s local Fox 17 News West Michigan has the equally heartwarming and profoundly infuriating story of Lexi Bergeron, a fourth grade student at Ferry Elementary school in Michigan.
Lexi Bergeron was inspired after hearing about students who couldn't afford lunches on the nightly news. She found out that some of her classmates would only get cheese sandwiches if they have a debt on their lunch account.
Lexi is in 4th grade at Ferry Elementary. She is "Paying It Forward" not just for her school, but the whole district. Lexi started making fidget strings for $1 each, and made $11 the first week.
So great. Except what the story doesn’t get into until you watch it is that Ferry Elementary averaged about 40 students, every day, not getting a hot lunch. What does this mean exactly? Well, if you are $5 or more in “lunch debt,” you cannot have a hot lunch. But never fear, if you don’t have the money or you forgot your money you will still get a cold cheese sandwich. A. Cheese. Sandwich.
Lexi's mother, Sara, put together a GoFundMe page, hoping to raise $188 to pay off the entire Ferry Elementary school lunch debt.
They have been fundraising in the hopes of reaching $2,200 in order to provide hot lunches for their whole district. To put this into very simple, elementary school math terms: there are numerous children going to public schools in this district in Michigan, that are being fed cold cheese sandwiches for lunch every day because of a little over $2,000.
While Republicans try to assuage their well-earned Christian guilt by pretending that things like food stamps aren’t used to feed children, just remember how they are treating the CHIP program right now—the program they claim to actually like. The disingenuous “bootstrapping” argument employed people to support this kind of child abuse is reprehensible.