Pflugerville Abuzz After Couple Pays Off Students' Unpaid Lunch Balances At Elementary School

PFLUGERVILLE, TX — The town-folk are still abuzz a week after the mysterious couple who wandered into town last week, went to an elementary school, whipped out their checkbook and paid off all students' unpaid lunch bill balances.

It sounds like something out of a movie, but it really did happen about two weeks ago. Principal Ben O'Connor of Rowe Lane Elementary, 3112 Speidel Dr., told KXAN he had never seen the couple before, and they had no children attending. But one half of the couple said a niece had gone through the school some time back.

But the image of a child unable to buy a school lunch — stuck with a carton of milk, sandwich or nothing at all — clearly touched a nerve: " 'You guys are in our neighborhood, so we thought we want to drop by and do something,' " O'Connor recalled the couple saying.

The couple's source of inspiration for the act of kindness came from a news story about one such benefactor who paid off student lunch balances at a school where 960 children were enrolled. The random act of kindness came from the fertile mind of New York City-based writer Ashley C. Ford as expressed in a simple tweet this past December.

"A cool thing you can do today is try to find out which of your local schools have kids with overdue lunch accounts and pay them off," was Ford's simple entreaty to her thousands of followers.

Since her posting the idea on Twitter, reports have surfaced from all over the country of ordinary people visiting schools to zero out lunch balances: In Minnesota, where an online fundraising effort paid nearly $100,000 in lunch debt at Minneapolis schools and $28,000 in St. Paul; anonymous donors helping erase $6,000 in debts in Topeka, Kansas; another $2,000 retired in Bellevue, Wash.; $1,200 erased in Wilmington, Del; another $900 in Herminie, Penn.

In Pflugerville, the kindness arrived at the best time. O'Connor told the news station the post-holiday period is the time of year when families rack up the greatest lunchroom debt, be it for financial reasons or simply from forgetting to add money to their children's meal accounts.

No one knows who the strangers are who strode into town that day, checkbook in hand (they asked for privacy) to pay what amounted to hundreds of dollars in erased lunch debts before departing. But the spirit of their generosity lives on, hovering above the Pflugerville atmosphere like a lingering warm glow.

>>> Read the full story at KXAN

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