kindness
Incarcerated men raised $4,267 to clear kids' lunch debt
Many of them had gone hungry as kids. They remembered.
Men incarcerated at the Norton Correctional Facility in northwest Kansas raised $3,810 from their own accounts to help clear a local school lunch debt. Norton Community Schools, which keeps serving hot breakfasts and lunches even when family accounts go negative, finished the 2025-26 year roughly $6,000 behind on meals for kids who couldn't pay. The men heard about it and organized through Reaching Out From Within, an incarcerated-led program founded in Kansas in 1982. Staff at the Kansas Department of Corrections chipped in another $457, covering about 71% of what the district was owed. On August 3, about 30 of them gathered to hand over $4,267 to superintendent Corey Roy. Several told him afterward that they had gone hungry as children, and that it had shaped their own schooling. "I was moved at how the men I spoke with wanted to make a positive impact to help others in the community," Roy said. They did it for a young person they will never meet.
