An average of 15 children in Lafayette Parish schools go without lunch each school day because they don’t have the money to pay for it.
It’s a statistic that Louisiana Lunch Money has been working to address since the Legislature passed a measure that prohibits students from “charging” their lunch if they don’t have money or don’t qualify for free or reduced lunch. Those students are given a snack instead, such as graham crackers and milk.
According to The Advertiser, Lunch Money founder Cerrisa Couvillion says the organization covers lunches for 230 students daily in Lafayette Parish at a cost of roughly $400 a day:
The Louisiana Lunch Money funds are not meant to provide long-term lunch money assistance. Instead, the funds are meant for children whose families may forget to send lunch money on a particular day, whose parents may not be aware of a delinquent lunch account, or whose families may be experiencing unusual circumstances and hardships and do not have the money to pay for lunch.
The money raised through donations and other fundraising efforts is quickly depleting, Couvillon says, prompting concerns that hundreds of students in Lafayette Parish will go hungry at school.
To help Couvillon’s cause, Sonic Drive-In restaurants in Lafayette will donate 10 percent of the profits they receive from 5 to 8 p.m. on Sept. 20. Tips given to carhops will also go toward feeding LPSS students.
Visit the Louisiana Lunch Money website for more information on how to help.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
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This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
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Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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