This is really sad -- I totally understand why kids feel this way, so it's incumbent upon school systems to design a system that doesn't stigmatize low-income kids.

Although Francisco Velazquez, a 14-year-old freshman with spiky hair and sunglasses, qualifies for a free lunch at Balboa High School here, he was not eating.

He scanned the picnic table full of his friends in a school courtyard one day a few weeks ago, and said, “I’m not hungry.”

On another day, a group of classmates who also qualify for federally subsidized lunches sat on a bench. One ate a slice of pizza from the line where students pay for food; the rest went without.

Lunchtime “is the best time to impress your peers,” said Lewis Geist, a senior at Balboa and its student body president. Being seen with a subsidized meal, he said, “lowers your status.”

San Francisco school officials are looking at ways to encourage more poor students to accept government-financed meals, including the possibility of introducing cashless cafeterias where all students are offered the same food choices and use debit cards or punch in codes on a keypad so that all students check out at the cashier in the same manner.

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Free Lunch Isn’t Cool, So Some Students Go Hungry

By CAROL POGASH

Published: March 1, 2008

www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/education/01lunch.html

SAN FRANCISCO — Although Francisco Velazquez, a 14-year-old freshman with spiky hair and sunglasses, qualifies for a free lunch at Balboa High School here, he was not eating.