Families Are Paying Millions in School Lunch Junk Fees
One of the world’s largest payment processing companies is charging parents exorbitant fees to load money into students’ meal accounts. The operation is now facing federal scrutiny.
Students at Pembroke Elementary School being served school lunch on September 7, 2023, in Pembroke, North Carolina. (Matt McClain / the Washington Post via Getty Images)
Last fall, Emily Krieger, a mother in Bozeman, Montana, began to wonder about the unending fees she was paying to provide her two children lunch money at their local public school.
A cafeteria lunch at Emily Dickinson Elementary School, where Krieger’s children attend, costs $2.25, plus $1 for a carton of milk. Yet last year, the cost of loading money onto students’ meal accounts — which are managed by a website called MySchoolBucks — increased to $3.25 per transaction. The fee had grown larger than the cost of an entire meal.
“It caught my attention,” Krieger told the Lever. On the MySchoolBucks website, the $3.25 charge was called a “program fee.” But that money, Krieger learned, wasn’t going toward her children’s school.
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