A Utah teacher's TikTok post about student lunch debt has gone viral and helped raise over tens of thousands of dollars in donations for children's unpaid meal balances.
In a Jan. 30 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 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 since 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 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.
"I thought best case scenario, we maybe get a couple of hundred bucks and be able to help a couple of students and even that would have been awesome," Jones said.
But in the weeks since his post, Jones started seeing the donations pour in.
"It was cool to see strangers stepping up to help kids through a hard situation," he said.
Jones explained that as a teacher, he's had to periodically hand out notices to students with outstanding lunch balances and the experience is often uncomfortable for students, some of whom may skip lunches entirely.
"I think the fear of hearing you have a balance and maybe some kids are around ... that is just terrifying for a middle schooler," Jones said. "The chance of being embarrassed outweighs the problem of being hungry for a lot of them, I think. And so they just kind of avoid altogether."
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.
MORE: Mom starts campaign to pay off $232,000 in school lunch debtSchool districts across the U.S. have reported over $19 million in lunch debt, according to a survey released by the nonprofit School Nutrition Association in January. In addition, the anti-hunger organization Feeding America estimates approximately 9 million children in the country are experiencing food insecurity.
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.
"We can all lift where we stand. We can reach out to our own districts and say, 'Hey, is this a problem here? How can I help?'" he said. "We've seen through this that $1 or $2 from a lot of people makes [a] gigantic difference."
"On a higher level, we can reach out to our representatives and say, 'Hey, we support this. This is a good use of our tax dollars. We should feed our students and make sure at the very least when they're going into school … we can guarantee that they had a good meal."