Friday Tale ~ Meal Fund T hey call it “lunch shaming.” I call it cruelty. For nearly four decades, I stood by and saw it play out in my classroom’s shadow. Then one ordinary Tuesday, I finally broke the rules. My name is Daniel Whitmore. For 38 years, I’ve been a history teacher. My days were spent inside gray cinder block walls, with shelves of fraying textbooks and the steady drone of the dismissal bell at 2:15 every afternoon. I taught U.S. history—wars, speeches, the Great Depression. I told my students about bread lines, dust bowls, and families that had to scrape together pennies just to put food on the table. But the hardest lesson wasn’t in any chapter. It happened every day in the cafeteria. It was a Tuesday when I noticed it with new eyes. One of my quieter sophomores, Jamie, a boy who sat at the back of third period, was in the lunch line. He was a good kid, always sketching little Union soldiers or Civil War cannons in the margins of his notes. That day, when he got t...