On Monday, a district child nutrition manager was sent to the school to investigate a large number of students who had zero or negative balances in their school lunch accounts.

The school district says that on the same day, the district manager and the local school kitchen manager started making calls to inform parents of the negative balances.

On Tuesday, the calls to parents continued. When lunch time came, students who still had negative balances were told they could not have a full meal but were given a piece of fruit and a milk for lunch. The district says it does this so children who don’t have money for lunch can at least have some food and not go without.

The district says that the problem is that children are served lunch before they get to the computer for payment. The children who didn’t have enough money in their accounts had their normal food trays seized from them and were given the fruit and milk. The food was thrown away because once it has been served it can not be served to someone else.

A popular gifted-student program at a New York City elementary school is getting the ax after school officials decided it lacked diversity.

PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald told parents in a letter Jan. 24 that Students of Academic Rigor, or SOAR, would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners, the New York Daily News reported.

“Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” Miss McDonald said in the letter posted on Flickr.com.

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – School officials at the University of Minnesota are working with black student and facility organizations after they wrote a letter to the school’s president about the racial descriptions given in crime alerts.

The rights of a transgender girl from Orono were violated when school administrators made her use a staff bathroom at her elementary school instead of the girls’ restroom, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled Thursday.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) – A New York City sanitation worker has been forced to take early retirement for accepting a $20 tip while on the job.

A resident gave Lenworth Dixon the tip for helping remove a large amount of furniture and other trash in front of her Queens home in September, the New York Post reported.

According to the city charter, public servants are forbidden to accept gratuities for performing any official duty. City rules don’t differentiate between a bribe and a tip.

The 25-year veteran city sanitation worker was forced to retire from his $73,000-a-year job and pay a $1,500 fine.

Dixon couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

The Obama administration has issued new exemptions to a law that bars certain asylum-seekers and refugees who provided “limited material support” to terrorists who are believed to pose no threat from the U.S.

The Department of Homeland Security and the State Department published the new exemptions Wednesday in the Federal Register to narrow a ban in the Immigration and Nationality Act excluding refugees and asylum seekers who had provided limited material support, no matter how minor, to terrorists.

“These exemptions cover five kinds of limited material support that have adversely and unfairly affected refugees and asylum seekers with no tangible connection to terrorism: material support that was insignificant in amount or provided incidentally in the course of everyday social, commercial, family or humanitarian interactions, or under significant pressure,” a DHS official explained to The Daily Caller.

In a speech during Thursday morning’s National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama acknowledged, “It’s also clear that around the world, freedom of religion is under threat.”

“No society can truly succeed unless it guarantees the rights of all its people, including religious minorities,” he added later.

The Obama administration has been harshly criticized by the Catholic church and civil liberties organizations concerned that Obamacare mandates that organizations provide their employees free access to contraceptives through their health care plans, even if their religious faith calls contraception a sin.

The Little Sisters of the Poor, an organization run by Catholic nuns that provides assistance to the elderly poor, doesn’t qualify for the Obama administration’s exemption of “religious organizations” because they hire people of all religions. The government also says they can avoid being fined if they simply hire a third party to provide the health insurance. If the Little Sisters don’t comply with the mandate, they could be fined $4.5 million annually — “about a third of its budget,” Fox News reports.

The Virginia legislature years ago banned governors from donating excess inauguration funds to political causes, but that hasn’t stopped Gov. Terry McAuliffe from finding a way to route $211,000 from his inaugural fund back to his election campaign and the Virginia Democratic Party, disclosure records show.

Mr. McAuliffe’s aides say the two $78,000 checks his inaugural committee sent to his campaign committee along with a $55,000 check to the state Democratic Party were expenditures for the rental of email lists. But campaign finance analysts told The Washington Times that the costs of the email rentals appeared to be exorbitant, and critics suggest the transactions look like an end run around the state prohibition.