STEVENS POINT, WI (WSAU-WAOW) – $25,000 dollars is a lot of money, and that’s the amount of lunch debt students in Stevens Point are facing.
The school district has been running a program called Money for Meals for the last two years to try to bring that number down. An area business called Express Employment Professionals reached out to them, and the businesses they work with, to speed up the process.
Brook Brown, the Migrant Division Director at Express, said, “One of the things that they say is that the lower-income families that don’t qualify for free lunches, it just kind of accumulates throughout the year. That’s the initiative, to help wipe that out before the end of the year, get that paid off so that those families don’t have to worry about that.”
She says they were inspired to help by a similar act of kindness from Wausau’s Yauo Yang. He organized a community effort to pay off a similar amount of school lunch debt in the Wausau and D.C. Everest school districts. Brown said, “I had seen an initiative in Wausau that a church and a pastor had done online and he had created a GoFundMe page and he ended up raising quite a bit of money, and I thought that maybe that was something that we could do.”
Sarah O’Donnell from the Stevens Point School District says that they’re grateful for the help, and that families will be too. She said, “Typically that will be something that either stays on that account, or like right now when we distribute those funds from Money for Meals, we just equally distribute that out to try to reduce that debt. Being able to help lift that burden is really important.”
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