Boy pays off lunch debt for his entire school in Washington, guess how!

Keoni Ching is a normal 8-year old child who wanted to do something constructive and original for the ‘Kindness Week’ at his school, Franklin Elementary in Vancouver city Washington. He along with his parents contemplated on what should Keoni do to make a real difference. Inspired by the American football player Richard Sherman who donated a whopping $27,000 to cover students’ lunch debt Keoni also decided to collect money to pay off the lunch debt of his school.

But collecting money just like that would have been difficult. So Keoni decided to make key chains and sell them. Why key chains? Because “I love key chains. They look good on my backpack”, CNN quoted him as saying. Once the word spread that he wants to make key chains and collect money to pay off the students’ lunch debt, requests for customised key chains came flooding in.

Keoni’s mother April, overwhelmed by the response, told CNN, “ There was one lady who said she wanted $100 worth of key chains so that she could just hand them out to people. ... There were several people who bought one key chain and gave (Keoni) a hundred bucks. It was absolutely amazing how much support the community showed for his whole project."

And then, there was no stopping. With his parents and grandparents help, Keoni could make 300 key chains and collected $4,015. He then presented the cheque of this amount to Franklin Elementary. This will pay the $1000 lunch debt and future debt of the school and the rest of the amount will go to six nearby schools who will get $500 each to pay off the lunch debts.

Of late, school lunch debts have become a serious problem in the US. Since 2012-13, the amount of unpaid meal debt per district has risen by 70%. The stories of children being ‘lunch-shamed’ had drawn the country’s attention. Some schools even went on to announce that they will only serve butter and jelly sandwiches to the students with lunch debts.

Keoni’s gesture amid such a scenario has come as a big embarrassment for those who intend to use this issue politically. For Keoni, politics is an alien zone. The only thing he feels significant is to help others around because as he says “It just makes the world a better place.”

Twitter too welcomed this boy’s gesture. A user wrote, "This kid has more brains and compassion in his pinky than our glorious President."

Another wrote, "This is a nice story about a nice kid doing a nice thing that wouldn't need to be a story if we didn't saddle hungry children with 'lunch debt'."

"Why does this kid even have to pay off lunch debt? Let's do the math: public schools are nonprofits, so they're getting the 'food' (& I use that loosely) at a nonprofit discount from a wholesaler, say Costco. Most of the prep for the food is not intensive" asked a user.

A post read, "This is a very neat gesture from this 8-year-old...but he should not be doing what us adults should be doing...these issues shouldn't happen...feed the children first...."