Lunch money: Crook County tells parents to pay up

Crook County School District has about 60 percent of its 3,000 students enrolled in the free or reduced price lunch program. The rest who don’t bring a lunch have accounts that are charged $2 or $3 for a school lunch.

The problem now is that almost 500 students overcharged their accounts to the tune of $27,000. That figure is cumulative over several years.

Of that number, about 400 owe less than $100 each, but many of the parents are not responding to the district’s requests for them to pay up. They’ve asked students to go home and tell their parents, they’ve sent letters and emails, and most recently they’re pushing for unpaid debts to the district to show up on credit scores.

“Now what we will be doing is sending those accounts to a collection agency, if they’re over $200 and there’s been no effort made to make those accounts current,” the school district’s director of finance, Anna Logan, said Tuesday.

But one parent said she was not notified and should not have to pay.

“I send my kids to school with an expensive lunch and they are throwing it away,” Alysha Taylor said. “When you’re not notified and it’s up to $100, when I can’t afford to pay that $100 because I already pay so much, it makes it difficult to want to pay it.”

Schools cannot turn away students who want to get a lunch, even if they don’t have money in their accounts.

But Taylor said it should be up to the school to know when kids have brought a lunch themselves.

“I would just assume that they would realize this kid’s never had money on their account,” she said. “There’s obviously a reason for it.”

The unpaid debt ranges from 5 cents for one student all the way to $768 for another.

The total debt owed to the district has increased exponentially — in 2015, it was $8,400, going up to $16,000 last year and then $27,000 this year. For reference, the much larger Bend-La Pine Schools are owed only $3,344 for lunches.