For status-conscious students, no free lunch

SAN FRANCISCO — Although Francisco Velazquez, a 14-year-old freshman with spiky hair and sunglasses, qualifies for a free lunch at Balboa High School here, he was not eating. He scanned a table full of friends and asserted, "I'm not hungry."

On another day, a group of classmates who also qualify for federally subsidized lunches sat on a bench. One ate a slice of pizza from the line where students pay for food; the rest went without.

Lunchtime "is the best time to impress your peers," said Lewis Geist, a senior at Balboa and its student-body president. Being seen with a free or reduced-price meal, he said, "lowers your status."

San Francisco school officials are looking at ways to encourage more poor students to accept government-financed meals, including the possibility of introducing cashless cafeterias where all students are offered the same food choices and use debit cards or punch in codes on a keypad so that all students check out at the cashier in the same manner.

Federal school-lunch programs began during the Great Depression to assist desperate farmers. By 1946, the National School Lunch Act was passed "to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation's children," a concern that arose after many Army recruits during World War II were found to be malnourished.

Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture spends $8.3 billion a year to provide free and reduced-price lunches for 30.6 million children whose families' incomes are at or below 130 percent of the national poverty level, about $26,845 for a family of four. The program also provides reduced-priced meals for students who are between 130 and 185 percent of the poverty level, or $38,203 for a family of four.

In Seattle, roughly 40 percent of public-school students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. Thirty-eight percent qualify in Kent, 28 percent in Edmonds and 11 percent in the Lake Washington School District.

Only 37 percent of San Francisco's eligible high-school students take advantage of the subsidized meal program. But the stigma of accepting a government lunch, while others are paying for food from a different menu, is not unique to San Francisco. It is a problem many school districts have been quietly confronting with mixed results, education and school nutrition officials said.

Most of the separate lines came in response to a federal requirement that food of minimal nutritional value not be sold in the same place as subsidized meals, which must meet certain nutritional standards.

"Anywhere you sell à la carte foods, that automatically means kids who can't afford to purchase them are being identified," said Kate Adamick, a lawyer, chef and food-systems consultant based in New York.

Most elementary-school children see no problem with free lunches, school officials say, but by the time they enter middle school, social status intervenes. And at lunchtime, as students choose with whom to associate, many students from poor families either pay cash or go hungry if they don't bring lunches from home.

"I know kids need to eat, but they don't want to be identified with free food," said Kenneth Block, a track coach and security guard who oversees the lunch shift at Balboa High.

Includes material from The Seattle Times archive