South Dakota's largest school district faced $400k in unpaid meal debt

Exploding debt forces district to implement new meal policy

(Courtesy of Sioux Falls School District)

Nearly half of students in the Sioux Falls School District are entitled to a free lunch. But hundreds of kids who aren’t signed up for meal assistance have been eating for free anyway.

The number of Sioux Falls families with students enrolled in public schools who aren’t paying their lunch bills has reached a tipping point that has the Sioux Falls School District implementing a new meal policy that could result in students being turned away from the lunch line.

And while it’s a difficult shift for the district to make, school officials admit, they say it’s necessary due to an exploding number of negative meal accounts throughout the school system here. And without the change, the district faced what would have been a $400,000 shortfall in the school’s nutrition program.

“We want families to know what we're up against here, and it’s not a place any of us want to be,” SFSD Community Relations Coordinator DeeAnn Konrad told The Dakota Scout Monday.

Right now, about 44.5 percent of the district’s 24,000 students are enrolled for meal assistance through the South Dakota Department of Education. While that program enables income-qualifying families to receive school lunches for free or at a reduced cost, SFSD offers meals at no charge for all students who qualify for those programs. That’s a credit to the goodwill of countless donors who contribute to the district’s child nutrition program.

But those donations aren’t enough to cover meals for students not enrolled in the free lunch program — whether they don’t qualify or their parents and guardians haven’t applied. And right now, hundreds of those students have negative meal accounts, and the debt is growing by $3,000 a day.

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