Many school districts have adopted the idea of offering different school lunches to students who have incurred lunch debt because the districts say that they have found no other way to pay the bill. The National School Lunch Program, created in 1946, provides meals to students at more than 101,000 schools at little or no cost. Estimates of the number of American children currently enrolled in the program exceed 31 million. Some students' families cannot afford to pay the cost, and so some schools have resorted to not serving those students the same food that is served to other students who do not have school lunch debt.

A not uncommon sight at American schools is a child's being handed a bag containing a cold lunch, while other students in line get a hot meal, with the only difference being that the student who got the bag has an outstanding school lunch debt. At some schools, such students are made to wear wristbands or get a hand stamped, to identify them as debtors.

In the most recently publicized examples:

• A Rhode Island public school district has changed its policy of serving a separate cold meal to students who have lunch debt after public backlash. The district had said that more than 1,600 students owed a total of $77,000 for school lunches that they had already consumed, with some students owing as little as $1 and some owing more than $500; further, the district said that nearly three-quarters of those who owed money for school lunches were not involved in the National School Lunch Program. A local yogurt company recently offered to pay off more than half of that debt, but the district refused. The original proposal was to serve cheese sandwiches, which were not on the menu, to students who owed money; after an initial outcry, the district said that it would serve sunflower butter and jelly sandwiches, which were on the menu; further backlash convinced the district to revoke the differentiation, and all students can again receive a hot meal if they so request.
• In an unrelated case, in April, a New Hampshire high school let go a lunchroom worker who allowed a student to ring up a lunch tab without paying. The worker said that she had known the student's family for years and told the student to pay the next day. A district manager had witnessed the set of events, and the company fired the worker a few days later. The worker had been at the school for more than four years and said that two of her colleagues later quit in protest.

Some states have taken actions to shut down the so-called lunch shaming. New Mexico outlawed it in 2017, and California, Iowa, and Oregon have passed similar laws.

At the federal level, New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall in 2017 introduced the Anti-Lunch Shaming Act, which would have shielded schoolchildren from being the target of any confrontation regarding school lunch debt. The law would have prohibited schools from publicly identifying students who owed school lunch money, instead stipulating that schools communicate directly with parents. A similar bill in the house had 148 co-sponsors. Neither bill was passed.

Most schools employ other means to address the issue, such as offering online payment systems or liaising with charitable organizations.

A Texas eighth-grader recently started an online crowdsourcing campaign to eliminate an entire school district's school lunch debt, which exceeded $18,000. Elsewhere in the private realm, parents and schools have taken matters into their own hands:

• A parent in Texas helped raise more than $13,000 to pay off student lunch debt in his child's district. 
• Another parent in another district raised more than $18,000 for the same purpose.
• An Elks lodge in Florida spearheaded an effort that raised nearly $3,000 for the local school district's lunch debt.
• A Tennessee parent helped raise more than $3,000 to help pay off debts in her child's district.
• A parent in Seattle raised more than $21,000 and paid off all student debt (breakfast and lunch) for one entire district.
• An anonymous donor paid off all meal debt for 171 students in one Mississippi district.