Good afternoon, Board Members. My name is Mariah Rabideau, a Weston parent and volunteer.

Regarding the agenda item on student meal debt, I want to speak to the heart of the issue: this debt should not exist in the first place.

According to your own presentation, Broward now holds $252,548.96 in outstanding student meal debt as of November 17 and is projecting an additional $688,526.38 needed from the General Fund to continue covering charges under the current directive. But these numbers are not simply financial—they represent children being billed to eat at school, and families struggling or unable to respond to escalating notices.

We also saw in the data that 59.8% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, and the district processed over 90,000 applications this year. These numbers make one thing clear: hunger is not an individual failure to fill out paperwork—it is a systemic signal that our families are stretched beyond capacity.

The district previously succeeded with CEP and Universal Free Lunch for two years. Ending those programs has directly contributed to this debt spike, because families who cannot afford lunch cannot magically begin affording it after September 22. A child’s ability to eat during the school day should never depend on an overdue balance, a missed application, or their parents’ ability to navigate bureaucracy.

I urge the Board to view this not only as a funding question but as a moral and educational one. No student learns well while hungry, and no district strengthens its community by sending families deeper into debt over meals.

Other districts in Florida and across the country have combined federal mechanisms—CEP, Title I concentration, state supplements, municipal partnerships—to implement universal free meals sustainably. Broward can and should do the same. Meal debt shouldn’t be managed; it should be eliminated at the root.

Thank you.