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US consumer watchdog finds that school lunch fees are taking a toll on parents (apnews.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.”

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Thanks to a working state legislature, school lunches are now free in Michigan. Before that, it cost about $2.50 for a high school lunch. Kiddo needed to either take cash daily, I had to load his school account, or he packed lunch from home. He liked to eat school lunch. We are fortunate that we can afford that. If I didn’t load his account from their website, and If the account went negative too long, he wasn’t allowed school lunch.

Sending cash with him was how I handled it but it usually took him going negative and the lunch workers telling him he was negative for him to remember money in his backpack. If I loaded his account from the website, there was a “convenience fee” of $3 or $4.