When Brigham Young University potentially faced a $50,000 fine for storming the field after its Holy War rivalry win over Utah, Crumbl CEO Jason McGowan offered to pay it. But the fine wasn’t enforced, so he found a new way to spend some of that money: school lunch debt.
McGowan posted on social media that he had wiped out the lunch debt for all schools in the Provo and Salt Lake City school districts.
Among the comments was a question. “What is school lunch debt?”
DJ Bracken said he had the same question not too long ago, when he first heard about the more than $2 million in school lunch debt Utah students had incurred in 2024.
“I wondered myself, having never heard of the concept before, are kids not eating? What exactly does it mean to have lunch debt?”
Now, Bracken is the executive director and founder of the Utah Lunch Debt Relief Foundation. It’s an advocacy group trying to pay down lunch debt, as well as pursue a permanent solution to the problem.
In its basic form, Bracken said students accrue this debt when they go through the lunch line but can’t pay for the meal.
“Now, you might be saying, well, they get food. What’s really the problem is how all of the school districts handle it, and they all handle it differently.”
No centralized person or team is collecting or overseeing data on the state’s school lunch debt. Bracken said his foundation is the closest to it.
When Gov. Spencer Cox allocated $1.2 million to aid in debt relief last fall, Bracken said he actually got a call from the governor’s office.
“That was one of the first things they did was call me to verify the numbers.”
This unregulated system can make it difficult to fully grasp the issue. Different school districts have different policies. According to Bracken, some send collections after the families, others pull funds away from other programs, such as art supplies or field trips.
In addition to business leaders and advocates, legislators, like Republican Rep. Tyler Clancy, are working to address lunch debt.
“ Every year we are seeing school lunch debt rack up to the tune of a couple million dollars,” Clancy explained. “And you're seeing that it's coming from families who are already kind of on the cusp of poverty.”
Clancy sponsored HB100, which focused on expanding free lunches to kids who weren't eligible before. It was signed into law this spring. But even with the new bill, the continued contributions from the Utah Lunch Debt Relief Foundation and the recent donation from the Crumbl CEO, school lunch debt isn’t going away.
Clancy said neither is school hunger.
“ By no stretch am I rolling out the mission accomplished banner, thinking that we solved all the world's problems. I think for policymakers, it's on us to review the programs that exist and are they living up to their full potential.”
By their estimations, Bracken and his foundation say in the 2024-2025 school year, lunch debt has grown to $3.6 million, a million more than the previous one.
This ballooning can lead to a sort of paradox, he said.
“Another way of phrasing it is like, are you perpetuating the system you are trying to fix by paying down this debt? And I think the answer is no.”
The best way he can explain it, he said, is with a story. When he first started the foundation, a social worker called him about a young girl. She was crying in the lunch room because her parents had been arguing over her school lunch debt.
“And that's the kind of thing where, even though the debt comes back every single day, kids are going through that shameful experience.”
He said he’s not the type to wait around while kids are experiencing shame and hunger.
“We want to pass free school lunch for all. We want lunch debt to not exist,” Bracken said. “It's in our charter that when lunch debt does not exist, this organization will dissolve, and that's how I want it to be, because it's a problem with a permanent solution.”
