A Utah teacher’s TikTok post about student lunch debt has gone viral and helped raise tens of thousands of dollars in donations for children’s unpaid meal balances.
In a January TikTok post set to Lil Wayne‘s “Lollipop,” Garrett Jones, a teacher at Rocky Mountain Middle School in Heber City, Utah, wrote, “If 2,673 [people] Venmo’d me $1 I could pay the outstanding lunch fees of every student in my school because the last thing a kid should be worrying about is how much they owe for meals at a place they’re legally obligated to be.”
The six-second clip has garnered over 5 million views in three weeks and has helped raise over $30,000, according to Jones, who said the donations will go to the outstanding lunch balances of students at Rocky Mountain and other schools within the Wasatch County School District.
Jones, who teaches digital literacy to seventh and eighth graders, told Good Morning America he didn’t think his brief video post would inspire such a huge response.
But Jones started seeing the donations pour in. Jones explained that as a teacher, he’s had to periodically hand out notices to students with outstanding lunch balances. He said the experience is often uncomfortable for students, some of whom may skip lunches entirely.
“It was cool to see strangers stepping up to help kids through a hard situation,” he said.
Student lunch debt has ballooned over the years, compounded by the expiration of a pandemic-era federal waiver that allowed schools to provide free meals to all students.
Jones said he hopes his viral TikTok can spark a conversation, and encourage people to see they can be “part of a solution” and advocate for change.