Alarming lunch letters, California’s home-schooling anti-vaxxers, school refusal: What Education Lab is reading this week

Now that the skies have cleared, it’s perfect outdoor reading weather. So we’re sharing the “What We’re Reading” section from our weekly Education Lab newsletter right here. Sit back, relax and take in these schools-y headlines.

Subscribe to the newsletter to see our favorite education stories from around the country in your inbox first, plus our best features from the week and, sometimes, upcoming Seattle-area education events. The newsletter also includes opportunities for readers to join the conversation.

Scary lunch-debt letters

District officials seeking to collect payment for school lunches have sent some Pennsylvania families the following letter, NPR reports: “This is a failure to provide your child with proper nutrition and you can be sent to Dependency Court for neglecting your child’s right to food. If you are taken to Dependency court, the result may be your child being removed from your home and placed into foster care.” One of the state’s poorest districts used email, robo calls and letters to recoup the $22,000 they say families owe them for their children’s school meals.

The next move for California’s anti-vaxxers: Home schooling

Now that California requires all schoolchildren to be vaccinated (unless they get a doctor’s note), parents who refuse to get their kids the appropriate shots are turning to home schooling, Soumya Karlamangla of the Los Angeles Times reports. Karlamangla crunched the numbers and found that the number of unvaccinated kindergartners who were home schooled quadrupled over the past three years.

Anxious and avoiding school

More and more students are too anxious to go to school, psychologists say. The problem is growing so quickly, KUOW reports, that the Child Anxiety Center at Evidence Based Treatment Centers of Seattle developed a program specifically for the phenomenon, dubbed “school refusal.” The center’s director estimates that about half of these cases are driven by mental-health conditions such as anxiety.