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.”
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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Thanks!
The payment scams aren’t going towards food in any way. The tradeoff you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply it went to the food in any way, it seems a straight processing fee because we can thing. That’s why I was surprised the list price of the lunch was only $3.
My $0.85 in 1986 converts to $2.44 and $1.85 in 1998 converts to $3.57, so if the price of lunch is around $3, that makes it seem like it has been inflation proof, at least for out of pocket cost. I’m sure property tax and state tax has subsidized it, but cost to kids/parents sounds like it’s held flat.
My cheapest equivalent meal from the work cafeteria is about $10 while only being modestly higher in quality than what i remember school lunch being like,
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.
My school district in Florida uses a payment service called “My School Bucks”. I use it to reload the cafeteria account, but also to pay for other things like before and after school. So far they haven’t charged a use fee. Lunch is about 3.25 (my kid doesn’t buy it often), but breakfast is free.
That sounds pretty reasonable. I like seeing “Go Florida!” moments now and then.
Their site says they service about 30,000 schools. It’s good it can be used for multiple things as well and the kids don’t need to worry when they forget to bring money. I always hated when I forgot to bring it.