A school in Methuen, Massachusetts printed a lunch menu advertising ‘KKK Chicken Tenders’ as one of the menu items. This naturally caused somewhat awkward conversations between confused fourth-graders and their bewildered — and in some cases, insulted — parents as the children sought to understand what they were to be expected to eat.

[One] parent said when she called the Methuen Public Schools to complain, she was told by someone in the Nutrition Department that “KKK Chicken” stood for “Crispy, Crunchy Chicken,” and the C’s had been swapped for K’s.

To clarify, this means that the school intended to serve the children “Crispy Crunchy Chicken Chicken Tenders’.

The concerned parent went on to say:

“(I asked) ‘How are you going to address this concern?’ And she said, ‘Well, we’re not going to reprint a bunch of menus,’” the parent said. “She didn’t even care. She was, ‘Oh well. It’s there. This is what it is, and this is what they’re eating.”

As attempts to reach the Methuen School Superintendent or Marsh Grammar School Principal (where the incident took place) have been unsuccessful, one can only speculate as to the motives. However, as their website menu has now been changed to say ‘Krispy Krunchy Chicken Tenders,’ it appears unlikely that the original mistake was a deliberate attempt to gain publicity for problems of illiteracy and redundancy. The insistence on maintaining the ‘K’ in the first two words will also continue to generate light debate on whether it’s appropriate to teach misspellings to fourth-graders.