Jokes about “mystery meat” and square pizza for lunch have been staples among schoolkids for decades. But when some Decatur students were recently faced with the prospect of getting cheese sandwiches instead of hot meals, school lunch became no laughing matter.
“City Schools of Decatur has accumulated $88,000 in unpaid lunch fees since 2022,” the AJC’s Cassidy Alexander wrote in a Jan. 25 article.
A grant from the Arby’s Foundation paid the kids’ debt in full so they could continue receiving hot lunches. Once again, though, the issue of making sure students get nutritious meals at school was back in the spotlight. That’s nothing new. In Atlanta, the debate over school lunches — not only regarding quality but cost — has made news since at least the early 1900s.
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“Superintendent William M. Slaton and women visitors to Atlanta public schools urge that hot lunches be served at recess to pupils as a safeguard to health,” a Sunday Journal magazine feature in the Feb. 1, 1914, edition stated.
“Some plan should be devised by which simple luncheons could be provided at school,” Slaton said.
Concerns about hungry students having problems focusing in class were paramount. In a pair of guest articles for the Journal, V.H. Kriegshaber, one of the ladies who visited the city schools, and Dr. Robert G. Stephens, the chief medical examiner of Atlanta, each advocated for making hot lunches a regular part of each school day.
Kriegshaber pointed out that Inman Park School successfully made the “hot penny lunch” work, but as something of a test run. Although “the board (of education) was most hearty in its endorsement of the plan, and agreed it should be tried,” it insisted on “the provision that the board must not be asked to bear any part in the expense,” she wrote.
“(The Ladies’ Board) agreed to furnish means and, with the financial aid of interested friends, a lunch room was opened ... a year ago,” Kriegshaber continued. “From that day, until the close of the term, the following June, 52,872 good, hot, tempting lunches were served to the pupils at Inman Park school.”
Kriegshaber stopped short, however, of offering viable, long-term ideas for exactly how future school lunch programs would be funded.
“Someday when the city provides means to carry on (providing school lunch) more extensively, it will be a labor of love for the Ladies’ board of visitors of the school to cooperate with the teachers in a work which is so vital in the building up of body and brain of children,” she wrote.
Dr. Stephens argued that school lunches were necessary for a child’s proper growth, functioning and overall well-being.
“A child at school age needs more food and more right kind of food than at any other time,” he wrote, adding that “a child leaving home at 8 o’clock for school, after eating his breakfast, no matter how nourishing it may be, needs more fuel or food to run his physical and mental machinery before he goes to his home meal after 2 o’clock.”
Superintendent Slaton agreed.
“There should be some way of giving (children) a light, hot lunch. Cold lunch, brought from home, is a substitute but it is not as good as lunch served hot.”
Although simply getting lunch programs started in Atlanta schools was the local advocates’ main focus over 100 years ago, there was no simple solution, then as now, for funding the meals.
“Before the close of the school term, about fifty principals ... sent a petition to the board of education saying they would have the lunch plan inaugurated in their respective buildings if ample room and equipment were provided,” Kreigshaber wrote at the close of her 1914 Journal guest article, adding that the petition was given to the ladies’ board “but for lack of funds the request could not be complied with.”
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
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