I obviously can't speak for everyone, but this never happened when I was in middle school and high school in the 90s. If someone couldn't afford the school lunch they had a free lunch program where kids would just go up to the counter and get a sandwich and a juice. No one ever said anything to the kids who got the free lunch because it's lunch lol everyone's gotta eat!
Making someone wear a wristband because they couldn't afford lunch just seems needlessly cruel
Yeah the wristband is some bullshit. When I was a kid and on the free lunch for poor kids program, all they needed was a fucking list at the checkout. I took my lunch tray to the checkout lunch-lady and said my name, and she'd check it on the list and we were done.
A "Scarlet P" as it were isn't defensible, but a name-only system seems ripe for abuse. Unless the employee can keep track of every student, all it takes is a greedy and/or cruel student to use someone else's name and they don't get a lunch that day.
Best method, imo, is free lunch for every student. No fuss, no muss. That children are held responsible for the economic welfare of their family (and there are people fighting to keep it that way) is atrocious. Just feed the children, easy as.
Tbf, cruelty isn't the point. For the recipients of the most benefits of conservatives being in charge, things like lower taxes and free handouts to corporations etc. is the point. And to Russia and China, the point of the disinformation warfare is to distract while invading others countries. And to the voters themselves, they get to live in a fantasy dreamland where "God is in charge" (ignoring all those pesky parts of the Bible that say e.g. take care of widows & orphans, the worker deserves their wages, you reap what you sow, etc.).
All the school shootings, all the lunch shamings, all of it, and it's all a by-product of those real goals. Children's actual lives, health , and mental health do not seem to matter in the slightest according to those precepts. 😭