I pay for school lunch online. I get an e-mail notification if my son's account drops under $10. Easy-peasy.
Yeah, well, it doesn’t always work out that way.
I once sent my daughter to school with a $100 bill for her lunches. She lost it. I had to seriously scramble for a couple of days to squeeze more money from the household budget. Thankfully, the school let her float for the rest of the week.
We didn’t have email notifications about school lunches until my son was a junior in highschool. I didn’t know it, but he was using his lunch account to buy ‘sides’. He didn’t realize that he was doubling the cost of each lunch with that behavior. Then one day he went to buy lunch and found out that he was out of money with almost two weeks left in the month.
The school was understanding. I managed to pay for an extra week, but they let us float the rest until payday.
Of course this was the month directly *after* my daughter had lost the $100, so that was *really* special.
(We then took every dime out of his butt. My husband made him move rocks in the yard for a weekend to pay us back.)
When you’re dealing with little kids, it gets even worse. And the schools aren’t all great about keeping parents in the loop.