When your child's lunch is repossessed - and other communication failures that require a little civic hacking

From The Sunlight Foundation, blog post by Emily Shaw.  For the full story go here.

This week a Salt Lake City elementary school made nationwide news when several dozen children who were given a school lunch were then humiliated by having it taken away and thrown in the garbage. The problem was not with the food or the kids. From the school administrator's perspective, it was the necessary response to those children's parents’ failure to maintain their lunch accounts.

And failure there most unquestionably was. The event represented a failure of management since the effort to alert parents about accounts was late and not fully successful. It represented a failure of policy since it’s doubtful that the cost of subsidizing a few lunches outweighs the cost of having hungry children in school. Finally, it represented a very serious failure of basic human empathy because what kind of person doesn’t recognize the shame and waste involved with publicly taking and throwing away children’s lunches?

While the specific outcomes in this case are uncertain, it happens to point to a pervasive problem across the U.S. education system. The nation’s 12,880 school districts have yet to collectively figure out a successful method for regular all-parent communication. In a period with so much change and year-to-year difference across curricula, learning interventions and software, there is really quite a bit of material for two-way communication and yet regular parent communication still often happens through notes in backpacks. Despite the need for good communication, less than half of those surveyed about their experiences with traditional public schools report being “very satisfied” with the way their school communicates with parents.

and:

This area is a ripe one for civic hacking: the creative use of technology to solve civic problems. Volunteer groups like Code for America brigades work to find ways to use technology to — among other things — solve problems of communication between government and hard to reach populations. Code for America in San Mateo, Calif., worked specifically on the problem of improving coordination among food safety net providers and the people they serve.