Single mother Rebecca Wood, 45, was already dealing with high medical bills in 2020 when she noticed she was being charged a $2.49 “program fee” each time she loaded money onto her daughter’s school lunch account.
As more schools turn to cashless payment systems, more districts have contracted with processing companies that charge as much as $3.25 or 4% to 5% per transaction, according to a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The report found that though legally schools must offer a fee-free option to pay by cash or check, there’s rarely transparency around it.
“It wouldn’t have been a big deal if I had hundreds of dollars to dump into her account at the beginning of the year,” Wood said. “I didn’t. I was paying as I went, which meant I was paying a fee every time. The $2.50 transaction fee was the price of a lunch. So I’d pay for six lunches, but only get five.”
The richest nation in the history of civilization can’t afford to pay for lunches for students so I think the only solution is for the parents to get more jobs. /s
No, really guys. Wtf.
Not here in Minnesota. Thanks Mr. Walz!
Same in MI. BIG GRETCH!
Same in CO! Polis FTW!
Free lunch here in NM too.
Free School Lunch is WOKE COMMUNISM! If you TRULY want to Protect and Save the Children you need to Hire ARMED GUNMEN to Patrol their School! That way we have Enough Money to Finance ANOTHER Billionaire’s Spaceship Hobby!
VISA and MasterCard need to have their fees capped by law like they are in the rest of the developed world. It works fine, our government is just too corrupt to do it.
Most banks offer bill-payer services. Add your school into your bank system and mail them a check straight from your bank. No need for envelopes or stamps, your bank will mail it for you. You can setup a repeating schedule.
$2 for me to give you my bank account info? How about you hire another clerk to process all the paper checks you nitwits. Obviously only rich saviors running the school district if they don’t see the problem with a processing fee.
This sounds like the schools don’t handle the payments for lunches. A third party does and as an electronic payment processor, they probably don’t provide a physical address where a check can be received.
The schools by law have to accept payment. The physical address is the school building, ATTN: Lunch Program.
Someone will contact you if the address needs to be corrected and also informing you there is now a convenient online option….
Edit: it’s also in the article that the USDA requires fee-free options to be provided
I didn’t have the option to have my bank send it in, but I printed a check for each kid each month to cover school lunch costs. I don’t know what it cost them to process the checks, but it wasn’t all that inconvenient for me to do. If there had been a no-cost way to load funds online I would have done it, but it wouldn’t have been much more convenient for me. I’m not going to pay extra to make it easier for them.
America is so f’ed up. I can, for free, send as many e-transfers as I want. It makes paying rent, phone bill, etc soooo much easier.
No children here, and the article didn’t give the average price of lunch. Google tells me it’s about $3.
Not to deviate too much from the article, which seemed to focus on how school lunchrooms have adopted outside payment options that use a Ticketmaster inspired fee model, but the lunch “base price” at least is better than I had expected.
The “back in my day” price was 85 cents in the mid 80s to I believe $1.85 by the time I graduated high school in the late 90s. For it to have ok not gone up about 50% since sounds better than the price increase on many other things, especially with food prices of the last few years.
It’s cheaper than the cheapest fast food meal and much less than my cheapest meal at work, while likely being nutritionally somewhere between the 2.
Any of you with kids have a more accurate real cost of feeding kids or more stories of these odd payment schemes?
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