She served an $8 school lunch to a teen who couldn’t pay. Then she was fired — for ‘theft’. May 17
A cafeteria worker in Canaan, N.H., was fired after a supervisor caught her violating her employer’s policy. Her offense? Giving food worth $8 to a student with no money in his account.
Bonnie Kimball had worked for five years serving lunch to the teens at Mascoma Valley Regional High, whom she called “another family,” the Valley News reported.
The contract to provide lunch to the school’s 326 students was expiring. A competitor was touring the facilities on March 28, and Kimball’s employer had extra managers on hand.
Kimball saw that a student’s account was empty and let him keep his food, the New Hampshire Union Leader reported. She also asked him to have his mother add money to the account. The next day, he paid his lunch bill. But later that day, Kimball was called in by a manager who had witnessed her act of leniency and fired her, she told the paper.
“It was my life for five years. I went and I took care of another family,” she told the Valley News. “You don’t just lose a family member, be okay and move on.”
Kimball created a GoFundMe campaign March 16 seeking to raise $1,000. A GoFundMe spokesperson, Bobby Whithorne, verified the page in an email.
Kimball said that she was following specific orders from her employer, Manchester, N.H.-based Cafe Services. In February, she told the Union Leader, her direct supervisor had instructed her to let students take food, even if they couldn’t pay, and “discreetly tell them” to refill their accounts.
In an email to The Washington Post, the school district’s superintendent, Amanda Isabelle, declined to comment on the employment decisions of Cafe Services, but wrote that “district policy is to make healthy nutritious school meals available to every child whether or not the child has sufficient funds to cover the cost of the meal.”
The chair of the Mascoma Valley Regional School Board, Cookie Hebert, told the Union Leader that “it was her understanding” that students who can’t pay should be given the lunch of the day and not a la carte items, which Kimball gave the boy March 28.
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