America's Children Are Starving

Amanda and her son, Dominic

Last week, Amanda Keown received a call from her son, Dominic Gant, at school saying he couldn't receive lunch because of an "outstanding balance" ($4.95) owed on his lunch account. Dominic offered to pay down his balance with the $2 he had, which would have brought his balance to $2.95, but that was not enough for the school. Not only was Dominic denied lunch, the school publicly posted his name, and the names of other students with outstanding balances, in the cafeteria for all to see. Amanda left work, went up to the school and paid off her sons balance, as well as the rest of the students with "outstanding balances". 

Amanda's receipt for paying off student's balances

While this is most certainly a commendable deed, there's a much larger issue here, and I'd like to use this as a teachable moment on the issues of food justice, food insecurity and food waste. We need to realize how REAL food insecurity is in America.

Food insecurity - 1 in 5 american children suffer from hunger
Food insecure households are defined as, 'households where the members are unable to consistently access the adequate amount of nutritious food necessary for a healthy life'. In 2012, 49 million people in the U.S. lived in households struggling to find enough food to eat, nearly 16 million in those households were children. In Los Angeles alone, there are 643,640 children living in food insecure households. Children are less likely to have access to sufficient food than adults are because they don't have the same access to money as we do, this makes school lunches so important, because they are a primary source of food for MANY children in America. So when children go to school expecting to eat and are denied lunch, that could mean going without food for an entire day. No child should go without food at school, EVER. 

Food waste
Not only did they not allow Dominic to eat, they THREW HIS FOOD AWAY. This is not the 1st time that a school has denied a child lunch and/or thrown the lunch away. In April, a middle school in Massachusetts refused to feed & threw away the lunches of 25 students who missed payments. A survey of Minnesota public schools in February found that 94% of districts in 2013 deprived kids of food in some way for not having enough money.

Food Justice and America's unrealistic educational expectations
We can't expect our nations kids to perform well in schools when they're being denied the only source of nutrition they receive throughout the day. Hunger has REAL implications. Consider how difficult it is for us, as adults, to concentrate when we're hungry, now imagine how that feeling is magnified for a child that's hungry in school. How can our kids be great when our school systems say a measly $4.95 "outstanding" food balance means more to them than the sound of hunger echoing in their students bellies. Don't get me wrong, the school lunches are not the greatest (that is a topic for another day), but when it's your ONLY source of food or nutrition, it's a necessity!

Food justice matters, it is a smaller part of the larger social justice movement.

(Check out Feeding America's Child Food Insecurity Report from 2012)


Contact me:
Email: Kim@soulrevision.org
Twitter: SoulRevision
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A 16yr old Black Girl, The Criminalization Of Students And The Push For STEM Studies

On Monday, April 22, 2013, Kiera Wilmot went to school and mixed "The Works" toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in a water bottle she brought from home. The outcome was a small "explosion" causing the top of the bottle to pop off which resulted in no damage and no injury to anyone.

According to the police report, an officer was called to the school and Kiera was arrested and taken off campus to a Juvenile Assessment Center. The arresting officer contacted the Assistant State Attorney, Tammy Glotfelty, who instructed him to charge Kiera with  possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device. Kiera has been expelled from school, will complete her diploma through an expulsion program and will ultimately be tried as an adult. But does the punishment fit the "crime"? And how does this incident fit into the criminalization of students and the push for STEM (science, technology engineering and math) studies?

We can't solely look at Keira's failed science experiment as an isolated incident. What happened to Kiera calls into question a larger problem, that of the Zero Tolerance policies and school-based arrests that have been implemented in schools throughout the U.S. and have ultimately criminalized students, particularly students of color.


A report released by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles Civil Rights Project, in April shows the increasing gap between suspension rates of black and white students. According to the report, One million, or one in nine, middle school and high school students were suspended in 2009-2010, including 24 percent of black students and 7.1 percent of white students. The increase use of suspension in schools makes it increasingly difficult for students to receive a quality education and research has shown that being suspended even once in ninth grade is associated with a 32% risk for dropping out.


How can we expect students to go to school and learn when they are constantly at risk of being suspended for small infractions? 

Kiera's situation also brings to mind the push for women in STEM. We have said time and time again, there's an underrepresentation of African American female students in STEM fields some of which are due to exclusions, mis-opportunities and under-education within K-12. We are constantly encouraging and urging our young African American women to explore these fields, and one has, and now she's facing multiple felonies for it. 

We cannot promote academic excellence and condemn the process by which that excellence can be achieved. After all, the purpose of going to school is to learn and making mistakes is a part of the learning process.


Twitter: @SoulRevision
Email: Kim@soulrevision.org