Busy American families are relying more and more on restaurant food.

It’s faster. It’s easier. But for families on budgets, too much of it is not a good thing.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

As a CNBC.com story put it, “Why stay home and cook when all of your friends are going out? Why eat a sandwich at your desk when your coworker wants to hit up the food truck? Why not order off Seamless for dinner? It’s so much easier.

“It’s easy to start from a $10 salad one day and end up with a $30,000 credit card tab a year later. In fact, it’s becoming common.”

Unfortunately, this trend has clearly spread to tax-funded K-12 public school districts across the nation.

As part of our latest series on wasteful or questionable K-12 dollar management, titled “School Spending Spree,” EAGnews.org sent public information requests to randomly selected K-12 districts across the nation, seeking data on the amount of money spent on restaurants or caterers during the 2016-17 fiscal year.

The information we gathered was surprising and distressing. Many public schools spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on restaurant and catered food every year, presumably all on the taxpayers’ dime.

In many cases, the schools spending big bucks on Chick-Fil-A, McDonald’s or Domino’s Pizza were also the districts with the biggest budget problems.

One example is the Austin, Texas school district, which is grappling with a $30 million budget deficit, but spent $249,766.66 on restaurant food in 2016-17.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

Another is the Aurora, Colorado school district, which was facing a $31 million budget deficit in fiscal 2016-17, but still spent an incredible $334,872.11 on restaurant food that year, along with $198,534.06 on “grocery stores, supermarkets” and “miscellaneous food stores,” and $44,934.467 on catered food.

Some other districts that spent freely at restaurants were Boulder Valley, Colorado ($262,815); Lubbock, Texas ($232,918); Ector County, Texas ($177,147); Santa Ana, California ($113,427); and Parkway, Missouri ($89,389).

In some cases, school policies – or at least the way officials choose to implement those policies – play a role in running up restaurant tabs.

A spokeswoman for the Lubbock, Texas school district explained that officials are required by district policy to provide meals for students who are engaged in “events (or) travel of six hours or more.”

She didn’t say if the policy mandated that the meals be purchased from restaurants, but that was frequently the case.

On Sept. 27, 2016, the Lubbock High School band practiced at the football field across town, according to the spokeswoman. She said the practice went from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. (note that’s a total of five hours, not the policy minimum of six).

“A band instructor used a travel card to feed three teachers and 206 students lunch,” she wrote in an email to EAGnews.org.

The cost of that lunch? $1,803.90 at Chick-Fil-A. Doesn’t anyone brown-bag it anymore?

In the Widefield school district in Colorado Springs, there were 457 transactions at restaurants or grocery stores, to provide meals for school employees or elected district officials, for all types of routine events.

There was food purchased for school board meetings and staff meetings. There were dinners for teachers before parent-teacher conferences. There were meals to celebrate the beginning and the end of the school year. There were meals for every type of committee meeting. There were teacher appreciation meals. There were administrator appreciation meals. There were custodial and secretarial appreciation meals.

There was food for new teacher meetings. There was food for principal’s meetings. There was food for assistant principal’s meetings.

The adult food tab in the Widefield district in 2016-17 totaled $46,082. In many school districts, that’s enough to pay one year’s base salary for a full-time teacher.

The hypocrisy involved in the school-restaurant spending spree is obvious, particularly in districts where they constantly whine about the need for more state financial assistance.

One of our stories quotes a teacher from the Arcadia, California school district, who was in Sacramento protesting the level of state education funding. She boldly told a reporter from Patch.com, “We need our state government to understand why funding schools is one of the most important places they can allocate state funds.”

Then we point out that the Arcadia district had recently dropped big dollars at many eateries, including $12,856.74 at the Corner Bakery in Pasadena, $8,134.07 at Jersey Mike’s Subs, $3,020.16 at Paco’s Mexican Restaurant, $2,090.75 at Casa Guadalajara in San Diego, $1,897.91 at the Workshop Kitchen and Bar in Palm Springs, and $926.06 at the Eight4Nine Restaurant in Palm Springs.

Should that type of spending be a critical priority for California state lawmakers?

There are obviously occasions when purchasing restaurant food for school employees or students is necessary, like on long trips when homemade food, prepared by school cooks or parents, can’t be transported, or would not stay fresh long enough.

But we don’t believe it’s OK for public school districts to routinely run up huge restaurant or catering tabs over the course of a school year, just because everyone likes restaurant food. Is that why citizens pay their taxes?

One of our public information requests went to the Tri-Township Consolidated School District in Wanatah, Indiana.

We received a simple reply from a school official named Tim Somers: “We do not purchase food from restaurants or catering services,” he wrote.

Perhaps school officials all over the nation should call Mr. Somers, or invite him to speak at one of their many conferences, so he can teach them how to exercise fiscal restraint.