May 4—Sean Cummings, an Oklahoma City-based restauranteur, has paid off all outstanding lunch debt for every senior in Norman’s public high schools.
Reagan Elementary School Principal Tara White accepted the check, signed for $5,165, on behalf of the high schools. In response to Cummings’ donation, an anonymous donor paid off all $1,451 of lunch debt at Reagan Elementary, too.
“We’re so grateful to Mr. Cummings for his generosity, and we hope his kindness inspires others within the Norman community to do the same,” Associate Superintendent Justin Milner said.
By his estimation, Cummings has paid off seniors’ lunch debts at 45 schools across Oklahoma so far, totaling over $90,000.
He does it in honor of his late wife, Cathy, who was passionate about making sure all students had access to healthy meals. In fact, she once went undercover to investigate reports of rotten food being served at an Oklahoma City middle school.
“She goes, ‘I’m just going to go down there and get a job and see what the actual issue is,'” Cummings recalled with a laugh. “She gave her real name, real social security number, the whole thing, had to get clearance, and took pictures of outdated, rotten food.”
The school fired the company providing the food and switched to meals made fresh in the school’s kitchen. Cathy was passionate not only about making sure kids had healthy food, but making sure no one was subjected to the social consequences that come with not having enough to eat.
“Her thing was, what nobody understands is what it’s like to be the poor girl in a small town, and everybody knows your parents can’t pay your lunch bill, because you get the cheese sandwich,” Cummings said.
Cummings focuses his aid on seniors because in some districts, schools threaten to withhold transcripts or diplomas if a student has an outstanding lunch balance. Some even threaten to prevent students from walking across the stage at their graduation ceremonies.
Norman Public Schools do not threaten children with consequences for their meal debt, electing not to punish them for their parents’ actions. Instead, the district takes on outstanding debt.
“Research shows that kids must be fed in order to learn, so we’ve made that a priority as a district,” Milner said. “We never turn away a student if they don’t have the money to pay for breakfast or lunch.”
That comes at a price. The outstanding debt associated with school lunches over the past two years totals $491,498.
School lunch costs were waived nationally during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Milner said he had hoped the federal government would keep school lunches free after the pandemic, and parents haven’t been as diligent about paying since the waiver expired.
Cummings hopes the state will eventually make donations like his less necessary.
Districts cannot use federal funding to pay off school lunch debt, but they can use state funds. Oklahoma currently sits on record-high savings; he said paying off $2 million of lunch debt statewide, prioritizing students from low-income families, would be a drop in the bucket to the state treasury.
“Instead of getting a tax cut, they easily could have done this. I mean, they did do something right by taking the grocery store tax down,” Cummings said. “But this is pretty simple: two million out of $8 billion is like a penny.”
He hopes, too, that his actions will raise awareness for the issue and inspire those with the means to pitch in.
“Maybe it takes an outsider coming in and showing that the problem exists,” Cummings said. “For people who live there to go, ‘Oh, God, I didn’t know. Here, we can take care of this ourselves.'”
