More than 300 local students have started the new semester without any school lunch debt.
Amber (Clark) Dawdy began a Facebook fundraiser on Dec. 13 to pay off lunch debt for all students in Brown County Schools.
Five days later, the fundraiser had generated $2,725.
Last week, Food Service Director Jason Kirchhofer finished dispersing the money to pay the off the debts on 352 student accounts.
The total debt was $6,316.89, and that had been building up over the last two years.
The district started a school lunch debt donation fund two years ago. Before Dawdy’s donation, the district had received $3,591.89 from other organizations and individuals in the county, including churches. Kirchhofer said the plan was to let the donations build up so that all debt could be paid off at once.
“It was just perfect timing,” Kirchhofer said. “This time of year it’s always about how we can help people out, and this young lady and her family did an amazing job of taking the bull by the horns and taking charge of it. It magnified the amount.
“It’s just an amazing that we have such a strong and loving community that is willing to give back to the kids, because that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do here.”
A letter will be sent home to the families involved, letting them they no longer have any lunch debt, Kirchhofer said.
“It was just an amazing experience that we were able to do it for every student that had a negative balance. I don’t think it’s ever been done, at least not since I’ve been here. I’ve been here almost five years,” he said.
For Dawdy, the fundraiser was a way to show her and fiance Billy Sanders’ three daughters how important it is to give back to their community, especially around the holidays when the girls had received many gifts.
“I really, really don’t want these kids to think that everything just gets handed to them, because that’s what they’re living like right now,” Dawdy said. “We have a rule where they do a chore a day and you would think that it was killing them. Any extra homework they bring home, we make them do, because it’s not going to hurt you to better yourself.”
Last year, the family volunteered at Mother’s Cupboard community kitchen. They also recently had the girls pick out their own clothing and toys to donate.
After reading about a friend in Fort Wayne who had raised $2,500 to pay off school lunch debt at one elementary school, Dawdy decided to start a fundraiser to do the same here.
“It’s not the kid’s fault. It seems to hit the parents who can’t get help more than the parents who can get help. If you’re right there in the middle, if you make a dollar too much, you get no help. Some parents are just barely making it,” she said. “It was a way to help a family as a whole.”
Dawdy and Sanders are both Brown County High School graduates. Dawdy was on free and reduced lunch when she was in high school.
“I didn’t ever have much debt, but if you wanted that chicken sandwich they had, you did have to have money for that. You couldn’t get something extra, which was also fine. By that time, I had a job and I could take care of it. It wasn’t so much on my mom, which was nice,” she said.
The first donation to her fundraiser came from a Brown County High School graduate, she said. “Most of the donors were graduates from the high school. That was really encouraging to see,” Dawdy said.
The biggest donation came from Marcia Flaherty Likens on behalf of the Howard F. Hughes Trust. “Howard was always a big supporter of the kids at the school, generally, trying to enrich their souls through the performing arts. But he was also a big supporter of Mother’s Cupboard, so taking care of these kids and warming their souls as well as their bellies was just really important to him,” Likens said. “As trustee, all of the grants I have made have been to support everything that I thought Howard would do.”
The donation from the Hughes Trust helped kick off the fundraiser, Dawdy said. “There were a lot of people from the community that donated anywhere from $5 to $2,000,” she said.
Dawdy first reached out to Superintendent Laura Hammack to see if her idea would be possible. The next day, Dawdy called back to get an approximate total of what she would need to raise to pay the debt off.
“Literally, just several days later, she called me back and I couldn’t believe it. She said she had surpassed the goal. It was amazing because it was within a week,” Hammack said.
Dawdy hopes that this kind of giving “snowballs.” A couple of people have reached out to her already about getting fundraisers started to pay off school lunch debt in their communities, she said.
Raising money to pay off debt from book fees is another fundraiser Dawdy would like to see happen in Brown County. Even though Brown County Schools are public and supported by tax dollars, parents are still charged book fees each year. Those can be around $100 per child depending on their grade level and the classes they take.
If the district does receives donations toward unpaid book fees, those debts can be cancelled on a student-by-student basis, Hammack said.
A student’s lunch debt does follow them from grade to grade until it’s either paid off or forwarded to collections. Accounts currently in collections were not paid off using the recent donations.
Even if students do owe lunch fees, they are not served different meals than what other students are getting.
The lunch debt fundraiser will help Brown County Schools’ general fund and the district’s food service budget as well. Last fall, Hammack reported that the food service fund was running in the red and that the general fund had had to supplement food services by about $100,000 over the last two years. At the start of next school year, the district’s accounts will be zeroed out to make the budgets balanced, meaning any still-outstanding debt would have to be covered by the general fund. That fund pays teachers and staff.
“Ultimately there’s a $2,600 impact now that will not need to be assumed by the general fund because this donation happened,” Hammack said.
“Every dollar is a gift.”
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Brown County Schools parents can make donations to help pay off school lunch debts through their online school lunch accounts. There is a donation button at the top of the page to allow anonymous donations.
Checks also can be written to the Brown County Schools Food Service Department. Checks can be dropped off at any school, at the school district’s administration building or at the food service office.
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