YONKERS, N.Y. – Patricia Meyer, food services director for Yonkers schools, describes the district’s problem with unpaid student lunch tabs as “a runaway train.”

Yonkers students racked up $809,000 in unpaid meals last school year, and this year’s debt is 22 percent higher, she told The Journal News.

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“I liken it to a runaway train,” she said, adding that each unpaid lunch costs Yonkers taxpayers 97 cents. “I don’t know how much longer we can keep covering 97 cents when that number of students aren’t filling out the paperwork and bringing their money.”

Last year, 94 students in the district accumulated unpaid lunch tabs of more than $1,000. A few others owed more than $2,000, according to the news site.

Yonkers schools are not obligated by law to feed students who do not pay, but district officials opt to provide the meals and bill parents and there’s no consequence if they don’t pay. Many students racking up debt qualify for free lunches, but their parents haven’t filled out the necessary forms. Others simply spend the money their parents send with them on other things.

“Families are aware that we do not enforce our meal charge policy,” Meyer told school board trustees at a meeting last month. “There is no penalty for nonpayment and therefore no incentive for families to complete meal applications or pay for meals consumed.”

School board trustees are now pondering how to address the situation without punishing students for their parents’ failure to pay. They’re considering sending fliers home about the problem, hiring a debt collector, changing over to a debit card system, and ways to encourage more parents who qualify for free- and reduced-price lunches to fill out the proper paperwork, the Journal reports.

“$809,000 out of our general fund is a sport,” board vice president Judith Ramos Meier said. “If we can only get parents to understand that when we sent these bills they’re not to spite you, they’re to make sure that your children are getting what they need.”

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There’s also a lot more at stake than the $809,000 in unpaid lunches. State officials withheld $3 million in federal and state reimbursements roughly a decade ago over a similar problem and are again threating sanctions if district officials refuse to take action.

Meyer told the Journal that past experience proved that withholding food from students isn’t the best route, but the massive expense of unpaid lunches is forcing officials to rethink their approach. Officials are now considering a three-strikes policy that would trigger a warning letter to parents after a second unpaid lunch. Children of parents who refuse to pay up would receive a cheap “alternative lunch” until their account is cleared.

“I know in the past it’s been, I guess, difficult for us to take a meal away from a child who has that hamburger right there on their tray,” Meyer said.

Diverting those in default to another line with the low cost meal would “cut down on some of the embarrassment or maybe crying we had seen in the past,” she said.

Meier and other school leaders, however, aren’t keen on punishing students with neglectful parents.

“We’ve had long discussion, and we’re going to continue to have long discussions, about the dignity of our students,” Meier said.

“We have a moral responsibility to take care of our children,” superintendent Edwin Quezada told the Journal. “It’s incumbent upon us to become really, really good in getting our families to complete the (free- and reduced-price lunch) application.”