An Albuquerque, New Mexico mother posted a Facebook Live video on her very active Facebook account. In it she told an emotional story of packing an extra lunch for her eighth grade son. She had been packing his double lunch for months before she decided to ask him about why he was so hungry.
One day, the mom from Albuquerque, New Mexico, finally asked her son, Dylan: “Are you not getting full, boo?”
The boy spilled the real reason why he needed two bagged lunches: “Mom it’s for this boy. He only eats a fruit cup for lunch. Can you make him lunch too? I don’t think he has lunch money.”
This past week Duran stopped packing two lunches for her son Dylan and his friend. The friend had finally signed up for and started receiving a school lunch under the reduced meal program.
“That school would never let any child go hungry. They take care of everybody, but this little boy was probably too embarrassed. He didn’t want to speak up,” she said.
[...]
“I was homeless a few years ago. I know how hard it is to ask for help. You get ashamed and feel embarrassed,” she said, adding that she also felt isolated from friends and loved ones “because we didn’t want anyone to know what was going on with us.”
According to Duran, the mother of the child had been out of work. When the mother found out about the extra lunch, she approached the charitable lunch maker.
When the mother of the little boy found out what the Durans were doing, she contacted the school, hoping to pay Duran back for her kindness.
“She says, ‘I know this isn’t much, but I just got a job, and I know you’ve been feeding my son,’” Duran explained on Facebook.
Duran coaches a volleyball team and that team raised $400 to pay Duran back for her months of double lunch making. But Duran took that money and paid off past due lunch accounts. This is not a case of a school refusing to give a child food. It is a school unaware that one of their students needed help. That, in and of itself, is alarming. Schools don’t need to know every personal aspect of a child’s life but whether or not they are eating lunch because of financial crisis should be one of the things to look out for.
Every time I hear someone explain how uniforms in school is the way to get around class distinctions and social inequalities, I think about how a free lunch for everyone is so much higher on my list of essential changes that must take place in our public education system. Having our taxes used in the service of our country’s children would say so much more about us than any skirt or tie.
x YouTube Video