What EC said, all the way.
As for the article … It certainly wasn’t condoning the “lunch shaming” practice, but it didn’t say that schools were evil or horrible or anything like that. It was looking at an issue (students who don’t have reliable access to food/food funds) and the ways that schools are dealing with the issue, with the focus of the article on the clearly controversial lunch-shaming practice. It considered statistics like how a 2016 “School Nutrition Association” review found that “of almost 1,000 school lunch programs . . . Nearly 75 percent of districts had unpaid meal debt,” suggesting that there is an issue that schools may not be equipped to deal with… as well as other complexities to the issue, like why students who need or qualify for free or reduced-price lunches may still not have access to them. It also talked about a variety of strategies either being suggested or employed… For example, the last strategy mentioned in the article is the efforts by many schools/their teachers/interested parties to fundraise—whether as charities, or through community fundraising, or through websites like GoFundMe.
That doesn’t look like blaming schools to me, or making mountains out of molehills—it’s taking a complex issue, a controversial practice, and showing how there are many other options out there—if we can put them in motion. It’s looking out for the young people who walk into US schools every day, who are largely dependent on adults in the school and at home for their wellbeing, and who deserve to be treated with respect and dignity…
@Sneki95: The student whose parents aren’t paying for lunches isn’t responsible for the death and destruction happening in the greater world. The fact that worse things are happening in the world doesn’t give someone a right to treat another person badly-but-maybe-not-as-badly-as-elsewhere. The fact that worse things are happening in the world doesn’t mean that we can’t also focus on the bad-but-maybe-not-as-bad issues. We’ve got a lot of human brain power out there—divide and conquer and all that. We have space and resources to worry about both the worldwide deaths and the students who are being publicly shamed at school and given lesser quality food… And it seems to me that if we can’t have discussions about this “slight inconvenience,” we’re going to have a hard time talking about even larger and more complex issues.
A large part of a school’s job is to be an equalizer. Students come in with so many different experiences, so many different kinds of knowledge, so many differing abilities. A school must give every student who walks into its doors the best educational experience it can give that student, must give every student the best opportunities it can give that student. We have free public education because a student’s economic status isn’t supposed to matter, isn’t supposed to affect the quality of education they receive. Granted, we have a long way to go to reach that ideal, but the lunch shaming runs counter to it.