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I had to laugh that one of my readers, Jennifer Donatelli, sent me a note about school lunch debt and then, as we were rushing out the door in the morning, my daughter told me she was $2 "in the hole" with the school lunchroom lady.
 

The Press of Atlantic City (N.J.) reports that schools are seeing more debt piling up in the lunch lines. The problem puts schools in a heck of a position -- they need to collect the money, but don't want to cut kids off from eating. This can amount to big bucks. I told you, two years ago, about a St. Petersburg Times story that said that local parents owed the school lunch program a half-million bucks. 

The Atlantic City article says:

More families are going into lunch debt, taking longer to pay up and bouncing payment checks. In a few cases, the debts are just ignored and have grown into hundreds of dollars.

The issue is sensitive. School food service operations are expected to pay for themselves and get the bulk of their revenue from lunch money. But even though they can, no food service director wants to deny a meal to a hungry child standing in a cafeteria surrounded by food.

"It's not the child's fault," [Heidi] Hibbs, [food service director for the Northfield, Linwood, Somers Point and Mainland Regional school districts], said.

While the daily $2 or $2.50 fee seems like small change, it adds up. One of Hibbs' schools has a balance of $3,000 in unpaid lunches. At another school, 30 to 40 children per day will not have money for lunch and ask to charge it.

The Galloway Township school district recently instituted a new policy where it sends a letter home when a student's debt hits $10, then limits the child's lunch options to the peanut butter or cheese sandwich when the debt reaches $25.

"You don't want to look like you are punishing the child," food service director Terry Zane said. "The goal is to get the parents to understand their responsibility."

There are several reasons for the increasing debt. With rising gasoline and heating costs, more families are struggling to make ends meet and cut corners where they can.

Most school districts automatically send home the application for the federal free and reduced-fee lunch program when a child develops a pattern of lunch charges. The program, based on family income, provides federal and state funds to subsidize both breakfast and lunch. Local enrollment in the program has increased each year.

But some parents don't qualify, or are too embarrassed to apply.

Using Online Video Well

The Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times uses online video to clearly demonstrate what a 28-gauge shotgun birdshot blast pattern would look like at 30 yards as a companion to the paper's coverage of Vice President Cheney's hunting accident.

This is such a great example of how to use online video -- not fancy, not heavily produced -- to let the viewer experience the information. Use this one in your morning meeting to show how to use online more effectively in your journalism.
 

Girl-Versus-Girl Fighting and Crime

The Chicago Sun-Times says girls seems to be beating each other up more. National statistics (which I cite below) show that this is not just a Chicago thing. You might want to take a look at school incident reports to see what is going on. The paper said:

After a sharp spike upward last school year, incidents of assault and fighting by girls are up again this year in the Chicago Public Schools.
 

Fights involving girls are up 31 percent; assaults are up 18 percent, and battery is up 15 percent.

So far this school year, 529 girls have been written up for fighting in incident reports to the district's bureau of safety and security, 255 were reported for battery and 67 for assault.
 

While girls have been steadily catching up to boys in violence rates in the past 25 years, few programs specifically target violent girls.

"This is a recent phenomenon, the increase in the amount and intensity of violence committed by girls," said Loren Simmons, director of sexual violence and support services for YWCA Metropolitan Chicago. In movies, video games and television, "They're showing us women who are not only fighting each other, but fighting men, and they're not presenting it as a bad thing, but that it's a good thing that she can 'kick butt' -- a way to earn popularity and respect."

Last year, Newsweek zeroed in on this rising trend of girls getting violent. The magazine's report said:

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, the number of girls 10 to 17 arrested for aggravated assault has doubled over the last 20 years. The number of boys arrested for weapons possession rose 22 percent between 1983 and 2003, while the number of girls increased by a whopping 125 percent. Today, one in three juveniles arrested for violent crimes is female.

"Girls are not what people think they are," says Dr. Howard Spivak, director of Tufts University Center for Children and coauthor of a new book, "Sugar and Spice and No Longer Nice: How We Can Stop Girls' Violence." "The change in girls' behavior is overwhelming."

The National Criminal Justice Reference Service, on the Justice Department's Web site, provides this insight (the page was last updated Feb. 13, 2006):

The growth in the female offender population can be seen in each component of corrections. As of June 30, 2004, the number of women under state or federal jurisdiction was 103,910, a 2.9 percent increase from June 30, 2003. At the same time, there were an estimated 86,999 female jail inmates, about 12.3 percent of the jail population. Overall, about 8.6 percent of persons incarcerated in prison and jail were women (Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2004, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2005). [PDF]

According to the Annual Probation Survey and the Annual Parole Survey, which provide counts for the total number of persons supervised in the community and counts of the number entering and leaving supervision during the year, in 2004, about one of every eight adults on parole (94,400) were women and almost one of every four adults on probation (957,600) were women. Women have represented a growing percentage of both populations since 1995. In 2004, women made up 12 percent of the parole population (up from 10 percent in 1995) and 23 percent of the probation population (up from 21 percent in 1995) (Probation and Parole in the United States, 2004, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2005).

According to data reported by local law enforcement agencies across the country to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR), females represented 23.2 percent of all arrests. In 2003, 20.4 percent of all female arrestees were juveniles under age 18 (Crime in the United States, 2003, Federal Bureau of Investigations, 2004). [PDF]

Many risk factors can contribute to women's criminal behavior, including substance abuse, mental illness, and spousal abuse. One of the most significant risk factors is prior victimization (Women Offenders: Programming Needs and Promising Approaches, National Institute of Justice, 1998). [PDF] According to the 2002 Survey of Inmates in Local Jails, a national survey of jail inmates conducted every five to six years, 36 percent of female inmates reported they had been sexually abused in the past.  Among the women who knew their abuser, 26 percent said they had been physically or sexually abused by a parent or guardian, and 34 percent by a friend or acquaintance (Profile of Jail Inmates, 2002, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2004).  Furthermore, according to the 1998 National Council on Crime and Delinquency multidimensional study of girls in the California juvenile justice system, 92 percent of the juvenile female offenders interviewed in 1998 reported that they had been subjected to some form of emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuse (Juvenile Justice Journal Volume VI, Number I, Investing in Girls: A 21st Century Strategy, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1999). [PDF]

Although the rate of offenses for females remains much lower than those for men, many unique issues for women need to be addressed throughout the criminal justice system.

• The Milwaukee (Wis.) Journal Sentinel covered the issue two years ago.
  
• The Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence's VAWNet, billed as a "National Online Resource Center on Violence Against Women," published an article that year entitled "Girls and Violence: Is the Gender Gap Closing?"
• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a similar story in May 2004.
• And The Boston Globe covered it in June 2005.
  

Now, before you get too excited, remember that it is the Congress that approves budgets [PDF] -- so we have a long way to go before anything is final. But nine states -- California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island and South Dakota -- would receive less money from Washington if Congress adopts President Bush's 2007 budget proposal. Most other states would see modest increases, according to a new analysis. Here's the breakdown. And here is more from Stateline.org.