Mom Calls Out School Cafeteria for Charging $2,000 a Year for Kids to Eat Grilled Cheese Each Day

Although lunch may not seem like a very controversial topic, whenever you have politics and money involved, even something as innocuous as a turkey sandwich can become a source of hot debate.

Take school lunch programs for example. While there are some districts that offer completely free food options to kids, 29.6 million a day across the country in some instances, there are many schools that offer paid meal plans for children to be served lunch in school.

In many districts, parents will have a running balance that they can credit to a child's account, which will then allow their kid to grab a meal in school. It's not uncommon for kids to deplete this balance and find themselves in situations where cafeteria employees will have to "spot" them meals until their parents can bring their account out of a negative balance.

And different schools have different ways of informing parents that their balances are running low. In 2017, this school caused quite a stir once it started "tattooing" kids by marking their hands for their parents to see one day were low on lunch funds.

A TikToker named Tenille (@prettybully.y.) in a now-deleted video, called out her kids' school cafeteria employees for the way they handled their billing.

She begins her video by stating that the school's cafeteria policy allows kids to either have prepaid tickets that they could redeem for lunch, or they could just have a meal plan for the month that costs $188.

Tenille states that because she wanted the kids to have a hot lunch every day, she opted for this monthly meal plan, as it saves her around 70 cents per meal instead of just getting her kids individual lunch tickets to redeem their food.

Her gripe with the cafeteria began when she found out that despite the fact that the cafeteria offers several different menu options, whenever she would ask her kids what they had for lunch, they would just tell her they ate a grilled cheese sandwich.

This didn't sit right with her, because she says that after tallying up all of the months of her kids being in school, at $188 a month, she comes to find out that she's basically paid around $2,000 for her kids to eat grilled cheese every day.

She said that she doesn't really put any blame on the cafeteria or the people serving the food to the kids because that's what they requested. They asked for grilled cheese and that's what they were served.

And their last month of school before they break for the summer, the TikToker said that her kids would be ending the year early so they could go on a family vacation. As a result, they would only be in school for 9 days of their final month.

So, instead of paying the entire $188 for the meal plan for the month, Tenille contacted the school to let them know that she wanted to transition her kids to the pay-per-day meal plan.

After calculating what the pay-per-meal cost would be, the total came out to around $108 as opposed to $188, so she asked the cafeteria to send her back the $80 difference.

Tenille added that she was also pretty miffed at the idea that they ate grilled cheese all year and she didn't want to spend another dollar on that menu option for her kids.

She said that from the get-go, the cafeteria employee told her that there was no way they would be able to switch her per-month plan to a pay-per-meal plan and basically told her to go kick rocks.

Tenille appeared to be taken aback by the terse response, so she decided to give the cafeteria employee a piece of her mind in a series of texts, because, as she puts it, "If you're not gonna run me back my $80 I'm going to tell you what I think about you."

She provides screenshots of the texts that she sent the cafeteria employee, which included a sarcastic remark about the person's "culinary career reach[ing] such high places" while also calling out the school for charging single parents $80 for grilled cheese sandwiches.

Different viewers had different responses to Tenille's post. Some said that they too would be "livid" and understood the mother's frustration. There were others, however, who thought that the meal plan price was fair. Some people thought that her getting a prorated rate after the fact was unreasonable.

What do you think? Should the mom have gotten her money back?