this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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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.”

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (11 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

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.

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