Hello friends. As I sit at home convalescing from a pretty good knock on the noggin yesterday (slight concussion and possibly broken nose), I have found something to rant about.
I have been to a casino exactly one time in my life. It's a very sneaky thing they do there. They make you exchange your actual cash into chips for the purposes of gambling. You basically exchange legal tender for chips with value imprinted on them. Mentally though, when you look at chips, you don't see them as "real money" and therefore find it easier to bet them. No chips = no money. Of course you don't realize that fully until you're empty handed.
The school lunch programs lately have done the same thing to us. Back in the day, we used to bring actual cash to school to purchase our lunch. On Fridays, my mother would give us a little extra for ice cream. You bought and paid for what you could afford based on the change or money in your pocket. If you didn't have money, you couldn't buy anything. Pretty simple. Good concept. Worked for us for YEARS.
Now, the kids have lunch accounts. As parents, we have to fund these accounts, then our children enter a passcode to make their daily purchases. Note, I didn't say LUNCH purchases....more on that in a bit.
Money was an easy concept for me as a kid. If I had money, I could buy lunch. Most of the time, I would bring my own lunch, because lunch boxes were cool back then. Of course, after elementary school, nobody used lunch boxes anymore, so we all bought our lunch. That's fine - we had money. It was easy to figure out.
I don't think my kids grasp the concept of what their accounts are. There is no tangible amount of money in their hand, so they feel as if they can just enter their code, and get whatever they want. I'll use my high school freshman as an example. Lunch at the high school is $2.75. My parents would have given me $3.00 cash every day and that would be it. Now, I have to fund this kid's lunch account. I put $20.00 on it, expecting to last an entire school week. Herein lies the problem.
Other than lunch, the schools have started offering a la carte items. Snacks and drinks that are separate from the standard lunch. He likes these things. Cookies, bottles of iced tea, whatever. The problem is he uses his passcode and account to buy these things too. So in one day, between all the extras, his daily expenditures went from $2.75 to $8.00!! It didn't mean anything to him, because all he did was enter some numbers.
I can't even go into the website I use to fund these things and limit their purchase choices, so I'm stuck. I am burning through literally almost $80.00 a week on school lunches for three kids because they like things like Gatorade and fruit roll ups.
Schools need not offer these extras. If they DO offer them, put them in actual cash accepting vending machines. Kids don't grasp the concept that entering those passcodes is actually using money every time. Is it just me, or was it a hell of a lot simpler sending kids with a few dollars for lunch? I don't want to hear that tired argument of "kids getting beat up for their lunch money". Kids bring iPhones to school - I don't think anyone will be threatening little Vinny of Debbie for $3.00 when they can take their $150.00 phone.
What is your opinion? Tweet me at @billwinters18, comment on Facebook, or comment here. I'll check out the replies while I'm at work, working to subsidize my kids' scholastic culinary intake.
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