New Mexico has become the first state in the country to outlaw so-called lunch shaming. Lunch shaming is the name given to the different ways schools have humiliated children with unpaid lunch bills in an attempt to get parents to pay the bill.
An Alabama, third grader had his hand stamped with, “I need lunch money.” In other schools, children are made to wash tables in front of their peers. Sometimes, schools will toss the child’s hot lunch in the garbage and give them a cold sandwich that’s different than lunch given the other students.
For more information about New Mexico’s anti lunch shaming law, read this article from the New York Times.
To read about the practice of lunch shaming, here’s another article from the Times.
Here are The Young Turks talking about lunch shaming.