As Anatole France remarked, the rich and the poor alike are free forbidden to sleep under bridges.

With two girls in elementary school and a mother who is a teacher, the Dringenburg household in a Milwaukee suburb had been joyous and excited about back-to-school season — until this year, when the Waukesha School District board decided to opt out of a federally funded program that would give free meals to all students regardless of family income.

Ah yes, let’s not have free meals in schools, because then poor children would have the energy to do well in school just as rich children do, and we can’t have that.

The board voted June 9 to go back to the pre-pandemic National School Lunch Program, which offers free and reduced-price lunches to students who apply and receive federal money for them. Waukesha is the only eligible school district in the state to eschew the funding.

Never underestimate the joys of spite.

In June, the board voted to forgo the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service’s extension of the Seamless Summer Option, a program to provide free meals to all students through June 30, 2022, because the pandemic was expected to burden some children’s nutrition.

Of course it was and is. People are losing jobs because of the pandemic, or having to leave jobs because the kids aren’t in school, or having other pandemic-related money-drains that pinch their ability to buy good nutrition.

Chrissy Sebald, a soccer coach and foster parent, was overjoyed last year with the district’s decision to give a free meal to all students. It meant her foster children could avoid some awkward conversations.

“Kids called them out for getting the different meals and asked them, ‘Why do you get lunch every day?’ ” she said. “When it was free for everyone, you never had to have that conversation because everyone had access to it. So I really appreciated that it evened out the playing field in a way.”

The reversal, she said, was unfair — especially to those families who live paycheck-to-paycheck but do not qualify for the aid.

But sadism is so much fun.