Johnny Cook, a school bus driver in Haralson County, Georgia, was taken by surprise when a middle-schooler approached him and told him he was hungry.
The boy’s lunch card were 40 cents short, so he didn’t get to eat lunch that day.
Cook couldn’t stop thinking about the incident. When he got home, he sat down with his computer and went on Facebook to describe what happened:
The Facebook post went viral, but also didn’t go unnoticed by the school. The very next day he was called in to the superintendent’s office and given two options: he must recant his Facebook post or he would be fired.
He chose the latter. In doing so, while sacrificing his paycheck, he received immense support online, and phone calls from people thanking him. During a CNN interview, he described such a call from a man telling him:
“This happened to my son […] Thank you for standing up.”
But CNN concluded that there are always two sides to every story, and set out to interview the school’s superintendent Brett Stanton as well. He had investigated the incident, and said:
“Video surveillance footage clearly shows that the student never went through the lunch lines at Harrison County Middle School.”
If so, he couldn’t have been denied lunch as he claimed either. But Stanton looks uncomfortable when he’s forced to explain why the child wasn’t in the lunch line,
“When you have almost a thousand students, it’s very difficult to notice.”
He didn’t want to discuss Cook’s firing either, except to say the school has a strict Facebook policy.
The boy’s family backs up Cook’s story, and Cook didn’t regret sharing it online.
“I’m proud that I was able to take a stand where others might not have been able to, and that I think maybe, in some little way, cause a change.”
Johnny Cook is a hero. The incident happened the last week of school in 2013, but the heartwarming story of one man’s sacrifice to bring attention to one hungry child who was denied food in school, continues to inspire and still receives attention in the media.
Featured image screengrab from YouTube.
