In less than two days, a GoFundMe campaign raised almost enough money to cover the $88,000 in school meal debt accrued in City Schools of Decatur.
The small school district in DeKalb County instead announced an arrangement with the Arby’s Foundation to cover the debt.
Jasmine Crowe-Houston, who started the GoFundMe campaign, is returning the money she raised online to the more than 1,800 donors. She said she offered another way for Decatur to use the money to help students with unpaid meal debt but was rebuffed again.
It’s not the conclusion Crowe-Houston envisioned, but she’s glad the effort raised awareness about the problem among many who donated to the GoFundMe campaign.
“It’s definitely not the ending that I would have wanted, but it has opened my eyes up to just school lunch and issues as a whole,” she said in an interview Friday. “I would really like to potentially advocate that lunch be free for all students — I think that’s the way to go so this doesn’t happen again.”
Decatur had been accruing the debt since a pandemic-era federal program to give free meals to all students ended in 2022, officials explained. To avoid more debt, it planned starting Feb. 2 to give children who couldn’t pay for lunch a cheese sandwich and milk, rather than the hot lunch on the menu that day — drawing criticism on social media and interest from people in the community who wanted to help.
Crowe-Houston, founder of Goodr, a company that works to end hunger, said district officials felt like her donation wasn’t needed.
The school district has a less than 10% poverty rate, it noted in a recent statement, and eligible families get free meals through a federal, income-based program. In Decatur, 765 of the district’s roughly 5,500 students were affected by the meal debt, the Arby’s Foundation said in a news release.
“One of the things I can definitely attest to, having really been in this space, especially since the pandemic: People are struggling. There’s a higher rate of inflation, grocery costs are higher, there’s been a lot of strikes and layoffs in industries that affect Atlanta quite greatly,” she said. “Even though there were people that were self-paying (for lunches), I still believe there could be change in families’ situations that maybe they just couldn’t pay.”
School lunch debt has risen locally and nationally in recent years, experts say. Organizations like the Arby’s Foundation and the Cumming-based All for Lunch, as well as crowd-sourced donations from the community, often fill in the gaps. On Thursday, Chad Fry, the owner of Evolution Cars in Conyers, is donating $7,613 to cover all current outstanding student meal charges throughout the Rockdale school district, officials said.
City Schools of Decatur planned to begin giving the alternative meals to students in February, but at this time is not planning to implement that change, Decaturish.com first reported. The district is still committed to finding ways to avoid accumulating debt in the future, a spokesperson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“City Schools of Decatur is grateful for the overwhelming support we have received from the greater Atlanta community,” read a statement from the district Thursday.
Helping students
The Arby’s Foundation announced donations to pay off the debt for roughly 6,600 students in three other metro Atlanta districts:
- $73,273 to the Cobb County School District, impacting 1,295 students
- $35,000 to the Henry County School District, impacting 4,276 students
- $7,261 to the Fulton County School District, impacting 1,077 students
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