I’m a proud product of Hawaii public schools but you don’t pass through any educational institution without some painful memories.

One day three middle-school girls who were a lot bigger than me tried to beat me into giving them my lunch money in a breezeway at Kailua Intermediate School. Lunch money could be tight in our home, where my dad was a state employee and mom had only a part-time job, with four kids and a live-in grandma to support. So I held on fiercely to that quarter, which is how much lunch cost then, keeping it tight in my increasingly sweaty palm, until the girls stopped hitting me and gave up, looking for an easier target elsewhere.

It still makes me mad when I think of bullies going after kids’ lunch money.

It turns out the new types of bullies are coming at kids and their parents electronically, including in Hawaii’s schools.

In July, a report from the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau exposed a disturbing new way that powerful forces were stepping in to take a chunk of school kids’ food money. In the past decade, school districts have increasingly shifted to electronic payment systems for parents to use for things like school lunches.

It makes obvious sense: it’s easier and more efficient for parents and schools to handle payments in this way instead of kids bringing in checks or cash and harried cafeteria workers struggling to stash checks and make change.

But the CFPB also noted what federal officials considered an alarming new trend — school administrators allowing the companies that process the payments to take what is essentially a commission on each transaction. The CFPB studied a large sample of school districts nationwide to find out how pervasive the pattern was. They found that the payment processing companies were charging an average of 4.4% in fees that parents are being compelled to pay.

The CFPB calculated that the fees collectively cost families almost $100 million a year.

In Hawaii, the state is allowing its payment processer, EZSchoolPay, to charge parents a 2% “transaction fee” on each payment transaction, plus a 13-cent “convenience fee,” according to the CFPB.

The burden falls disproportionately hard on parents who earn so little money that their kids qualify for reduced price lunches, according to the CFPB.

Hawaii high school kids pay $2.75 for lunch each day. Kids who qualify for reduced price lunches — families of four earning less than $66,378 a year — pay 40 cents. Richer families are able to make larger prepayments and are charged proportionately less in transaction fees. Poor families usually have to pay smaller amounts more often as they go along, which means they incur more transaction fees.

To be sure, it’s not a huge amount of money, or roughly $10 a year for kids paying full freight. But charging a 2% transaction fee for people who can only afford to pay 40 cents for a lunch, plus a 13-cent kicker, is a heftier burden.

About 80,000 children in Hawaii pay for school lunches each day, with 10,732 of them qualifying for reduced-price lunches, according to a spokeswoman for the Hawaii Department of Education.

Officials at the CFPB, the 13-year-old government agency that protects consumers in their dealings with financial institutions, think those fees are unfair.

“While convenient for both families and school districts, electronic payment options present new costs and challenges for the families using them,” the CFPB concluded in its report. Parents have no choice but no pay, the agency said.

The CFPB report singled out Hawaii as an example of how the system works, while also noting that state officials have recently reduced the costs. In 2018, the state announced it was slashing the convenience fee from 80 cents per transaction to 13 cents and had reduced the transaction fee from 5% to 2%.

There are some ways to get around the fees. Parents in Hawaii have learned that they can avoid the transaction fees by hand-delivering checks to school administrators or sending them in with their kids. But that’s enough of a hassle that most simply accept the fee to make sure their kids get fed.

Now, some good news.

The federal government is stepping in stop the practice. Schools in Hawaii participate in the National School Lunch Program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Last week the USDA announced it was banning what it called these “junk fees” being charged by payment processors to parents of children eligible for reduced-price school meals. The agency said schools need to stop charging the fees by the 2027-2028 school year.

This is part of a wider effort by the Biden administration to rein in what officials have called a whole raft of unfair and hidden fees being charged to consumers these days. Bogus and mandatory “processing fees” are part of a growing burden on American consumers, who are being forced to pay more and more of them whenever they rent a hotel room, buy an airline ticket or go to a concert or ballgame.

Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez has joined 18 other attorneys general in urging the FTC to go forward in banning such fees.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, led by an activist chairwoman, Lina Khan, has proposed a rule to ban these fees. Tens of thousands of consumers have weighed in to voice their support for the proposal. Despite opposition from big business, including the American Bankers Association, the agency is pushing ahead.

Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez has joined 18 other attorneys general in urging the FTC to go forward in banning such fees.

The multi-state effort to ban junk fees was also joined by Mana Moriarty, executive director of the Hawaii Office of Consumer Protection.

Not surprisingly, these kinds of issues get political pushback.

The FTC’s Lina Khan herself has been under attack, for this and other things she has done. Some of Kamala Harris’s largest campaign donors, including Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, publicly told Harris they wanted Khan removed. Harris never specifically responded one way or another.

How the incoming Trump administration may view the issue isn’t yet certain. Pro-consumer action has not been historically associated with the Republican party but the traditionalist wing appears to have withered away. The ban on junk fees is popular with voters and might fit in well with what Trump has presented as a more populist agenda. Vice-president-elect JD Vance has publicly supported Khan. On the other hand, one of Trump’s rich donors, Elon Musk, has tweeted that he expected Khan to be fired.

Time will tell.

I have watched the debate over junk fees with particular interest because I was formerly editor of FTC:Watch, a newsletter in Washington that follows the Federal Trade Commission. I also once co-wrote a history of the agency.

It all tied back to my childhood. When I went to Washington, I carried within me the strong pro-consumer orientation embedded in our local culture, infused with the idealistic civic education we got in the school system in the 1970s. Kalaheo Intermediate (now a high school), where I went after Kailua, had some smart teachers who talked to us about how things really worked and the lessons stuck.

It is good that the USDA is telling school districts to start to get rid of these processing fees.

It only seems fair to move as quickly as possible.

There’s no way to hold onto your quarter when a software system is the bully.