Lunch ladies gone mild

We’re experiencing an epidemic of school lunch ladies getting in trouble.

The latest was Della Curry who last week was fired from Dakota Valley Elementary in Aurora, Colorado.

“I had a first grader in front of me, crying, because she doesn’t have enough money for lunch. Yes, I gave her a lunch,” Curry told the media.

She gave her a full hot lunch, even though school policy says that if you have no lunch money, you get a small milk and a piece of cheese on a bun.

But what I find remarkable is that not long ago, the trouble wasn’t over lunch ladies bending the rules, but enforcing them.

In Minnesota last year, there was a big investigation of lunch ladies who were taking the Soup Nazi approach: if a kid couldn’t pay, they would just dump the food into the trash in front of everybody. Another school sequestered the non-payers in a special classroom for deadbeats. Another school stamped the word “Money” on the hands of kids who didn’t pay.

If Charles Dickens were alive, he’d have written five novels about this by now.

And yet, it also wasn’t too long ago that kids were voluntarily going hungry in protest of Michelle Obama’s nutritious lunch campaign. Schools were urged to serve more fruits and vegetables to discourage obesity &#8212 and the kids just threw it away.

Which apparently led one school to what I thought was a pretty clever solution.

Kids who didn’t have lunch money, instead of getting the Oliver Twist cheese-on-a-bun, would be invited to select an unlimited number of fruits and vegetables. All they could stand.

That gets the point across, and yet it’s not really a punishment since they’re being fed better than the kids who have the lunch money.