By Pauline Masson – This Saturday, March 26, from 11:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. – or until the barbecue runs out – the Pacific Eagles will offer barbecue meals to pay for lunches for students in the MVR-III school district who, for whatever reason, cannot afford to pay.
Until the Pacific Eagles Aerie 3842 go involved school lunch debt was a something of a crisis unknown to many residents. Some kids in our community were opting to go without lunch rather than let other students know they had no money for lunch.
The policy at that time was than when lunch debt reached a certain amount, the student would not be able to receive the complete lunch, but would be handed. a sandwich. Everybody in the lunch line could see who got the sandwich and some students were so ashamed to be in that category so they did not eat lunch at all.
Most of the community knew that there was such a thing as free and reduced meals that provided lunch at a lower cost, or no cost, to students who qualified. But some people didn’t realize that there were students who fell through the cracks. Their parent’s income was a bit above the minimum that would have qualified them for the free and reduced cost meals – but not high enough that parents could come up with lunch money every day. Those students – to the consternation of school cafeteria workers and even teachers, often ended up not eating lunch at all.
When Pacific Eagle Mike Mueller heard that this was a prevalent circumstance in our school district, that some students were not eating lunch at all because they owed for past lunches, he said something had to be done. Mueller asked the Aerie to step in and help.
The Eagles launched its barbecue for school lunches four years ago. The first year of the benefit, the Eagles sold so many barbecue meals that they paid off the school lunch debt for every student in every school in the district.
But the district still has to cover the cost of the lunches for students who can’t pay so the Eagles made its barbecue for student lunch debt an annual benefit.
Meramec Valley was not unique as a district with students who had mounting lunch debts. What was happening here was playing out across the entire country. In 2019, CNN reported that 75 percent of US school districts reported student meal debt. They had a variety of ways of dealing with the challenge.
In a letter sent to about 40 parents in a Wyoming school district in an effort to collect the debt, officials warned that if the debt went unpaid, “The result may be your child being taken from your home and placed in foster care.”
Some districts publish in the local newspaper the amount of school lunch debt several times a year, hoping to shame parents into coming up with the amount owed.
But the Pacific Eagles say helping to eliminate student lunch debt in Pacific has been one of their more popular projects.
Dan McClain, Eagles bingo chair said Miller and fellow Eagles were pleased but not surprised that the barbecue for school lunches gained wide support from Eagles members and from the Meramec Valley community at large.
“People have just come forward and wanted to help with this,” McClain said. “It’s been our privilege to be part of something that not only fills a basic need but also gains the support of the community.”
Eliminating school lunch debt was and is such a wonderful thing for the Eagles to do. Hats off to the Eagles and to Mike Mueller for starting and continuing this fund raiser.