Oak Creek Student Lunch Debt More Than $133,000

OAK CREEK, WI — The cost of school lunch really adds up, and a recent report has found that the Oak Creek-Franklin Joint School District has a six-figure school lunch debt.

According to a WISN-12 report, the Oak Creek-Franklin Joint School District has a $133,602.77 school lunch debt - a figure that dwarfed all other school districts that responded to the TV station's request for information.

According to district figures, getting to more than $133,000 has built up over the years. That's a lot of entrees. Here's the cost of a meal in Oak Creek-Franklin schools during this school year:

Breakfast K-12 $1.45
Elementary Lunch (K-5) $2.40
Secondary Lunch (6-12) $2.65
Premium Meal (6-12) $3.45
Chef Meal (6-12) $3.95
Milk K-12 $0.40

Simply getting students and their families to pay up when it comes to un-recovered school lunch expenses isn't as clear-cut as it would otherwise seem.

District policy strikes a balancing act between staying up-to-date with school lunch bills and a student's need to have lunch.

According to district policy, "The School Board wishes to maintain the fiscal integrity of the District’s food service program and to incentivize appropriate household responsibility for the payment of costs that a student incurs in the use of the program, while also pursuing the critically important goals of providing students with adequate nutrition and minimizing the extent to which any student is stigmatized because he/she has insufficient funds to pay for a meal or because the student’s household owes a debt within the food service program."

In the WISN 12 report, Oak Creek-Franklin Chief Business and Finance Officer Andy Chromy said struggling families often have to make the choice between spending money on one thing, only to let another one go.

"A lot of families who are sitting tight and live paycheck to paycheck every month and they have to decide where their dollars go," he said.