School Cafeteria Manager Fired Allegedly For Giving Lunches To Students Without Money

An elementary school kitchen manager is looking at an unemployment paycheck after her repeated acts of kindness resulted in the loss of her job. Della Curry, a former school kitchen manager at Dakota Valley Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado, is speaking out after she was allegedly fired from her job last week for repeatedly giving food to children who could not afford to buy school lunch, as she explained in an interview with the area's CBS syndicate. Many times, she paid for these students' lunches out of her own pocket.

Under school district policy, children who cannot afford school lunch are given a slice of cheese on a bun and a glass of milk, which, according to Curry, is not enough for growing bodies.

"I'll own that I broke the law, but the law needs to change," she said. "I had a first grader in front of me, crying, because she doesn't have enough money for lunch. Yes, I gave her lunch."

She said that oftentimes, the students she helped had families who made too much money (more than $31,000) to qualify for the free lunch program, or families who made more than $45,000, therefore failing to qualify for the reduced lunch program. She took it upon herself to help students who, despite not qualifying for free or reduced school lunch, still didn't have enough money for lunch, and also sometimes gave lunch to children who had forgotten their lunch money.