Every August and September, just as kids shoulder their backpacks and file onto school buses, a familiar kind of headline makes the local news. “Retired police officer pays off district lunch debt.” “Couple uses wedding gifts to clear cafeteria balances.” “Sword enthusiast sells stock to help wipe out arrears.” They appear like clockwork, one per county, a seasonal ritual of generosity right alongside the other local-news reliables: the scratch-off lottery winner, the heroic dog, the “quiet neighborhood shocked” by an outlier crime.

At first, I wondered if I was simply noticing them more — a trick of confirmation bias, maybe, because I spend my workdays steeped in stories about hunger and the policies meant to address it. Maybe the algorithm was nudging me, too, serving these headlines in

See Full Page