But the problem is the money just isn’t there. You can’t just waive a magic wand and give every kid lunch. I’m sure we’ve all seen program after program cut from school curricula, so what are you willing to cut in order to get this? Because that’s what it’s going to come down to. We already have teachers buying schools supplies, and I don’t want them having to bear more of a burden.
It would be great to give every kid a pony, too, but the way things work in the US, it’s just not possible.
John, you missed the point. It’s about the C H I L D R E N for God’s sake!
Honestly, I would have no problem with just including lunch in the cost of public schooling. But the way we fund our schools in the US makes the whole funding process a nightmare.
You don’t have to cut anything, you simply have to fund your schools properly. A lot of people refer to Massachussetts as Taxachussets, but we come in #1 in the nation for education and even in Brockton, arguably one of the poorest and least attractive cities in the state that comes in 312 out of 320 school districts in MA they have music, art, theater, athletics, chess, and dozens of other programs, clubs, and extra curriculars that are being slashed across the nation. Alaska and Oklahoma may have very low tax rates but they both rank in the bottom 10 states for education nationwide.
I understand not wanting to pay more taxes for every little thing anyone ever wants, but at the same time this fear of funding important things like education because taxes infringe on your rights to do as you please with your money leaves us with a worse society because of it. I would rather be middle class in a flourishing society than king of shit mountain because living in shit sounds rather unpleasant, even if I am the king.
My problem with this program is that there has to be some oversight (and that’s not being discussed) to ensure the lunches are actually healthy. All the children and most of the teenagers in my family take lunches to school specifically because what their cafeterias serve is unhealthy: lots of fried stuff, oversalted, plenty of starches, but very little, if any, fruit or vegetables. True we can’t completely stop them from trading their carrot and celery sticks for french fries and fried burritos, but we can try.
My kids schools - and all the kids I know - have a PIN. No card, they just type their PIN into a keypad and buy lunch. Even free/reduced kids use the PIN pad. So no one can tell you are on free/reduced lunch.
Except everyone can tell you are on free/reduced lunch. Because being poor is something that has a lot of tells - where you live, what you wear, what color your skin is, what car your parents pick you up in, whether you can just go to the movie on Saturday with your friends, your use of language.
I remember being on the free lunch starting when I was in middle school (my dad, a single father of 7 finally decided to apply when I was in 6th grade). Each week I had to cut through the lunch line (no inconspicuous way to do this) to pick up a week’s worth of bright green ‘lunch tickets’. I fucking hated it. Even worse was then trying to use a ticket to pay for lunch without anyone seeing what I was handing the cashier. Eventually, I just stopped getting lunch. Sitting at the lunch table with nothing was better than the embarrassment.
I’m pretty economically conservative, but giving kids a lunch is not a waste of money.
Very few class markers are as unambiguous as being on reduced/free lunch, though. You can live on the “bad” side of town and not be poor. Generic, no-name brand clothing can be blamed on parental frugality rather than poverty. You can be well-to-do and be black or Hispanic. The school bus may drop you off in front of the projects, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you live in the projects.
You can’t rationalize away the reduced/free lunch card thing, though.
What’s next? You tell us, you started the thread.
So long as there are kids too embarrassed by their circumstances to eat there will be a need for free lunches. When all school lunches are free the stigma disappears. And maybe the parents who had to scrape money together for their kid’s lunches can put that money to another use, like their college tuition or utilities for that month. This small help can snowball into an even greater good (like for example, the long-term benefits of Headstart) if the people who hate not having a little control over those less privileged than them can shut their mouths and lend a hand in the name of community.
The kid whose family is so wealthy that a year’s cost of school lunches means nothing to them likely isn’t going to a public school.
My high school had a separate, clearly marked window. You didn’t get a choice like the regular lunch lines did, you got a “take it or leave it” tray.
Which I always suspected were the previous day’s left-overs.
Herein lies the problem with all of these situations.
First we argue, we want more, but we really don’t have to reduce anything to get more, you just have to do better / be more efficient / just fund the really important stuff / etc.
And then it shifts to: But the new bell and whistle that I want really is a greatest thing since sliced bread and we just cannot live without even if it does cost more.
This is how we are entitlementing (I just made a new word) ourselves into a debt that I have no idea how we are ever going to get ourselves out of.
Yeah, I understand that - except that my kid’s school district has done away with all of the physical markers of free/reduced lunch (even the alacart line - kids on free reduced lunch DO have accounts and CAN put money into them for ala cart offerings - and many do) - and yet my daughter can name the kids on it and the kids not on it with pretty good accuracy (my son isn’t observant in the same manner) because of all the other “tells.”
I’m not saying that it isn’t a good thing - a separate window?! Color coded punch cards! How about just making the kids wear a sign - “I’m poor and you should feel free to judge me?” Just that getting rid of the marker for free and reduced lunch really doesn’t solve the problem - and I doubt it even reduced the problem - of there being stigma attached to being poor.
I was one of the poor kids… we didn’t have separate lines, we had punch cards. We brought our punch cards to the lunch lady and got our meal (breakfast was free too). If we didn’t have the card (for any of the bajillion reasons an elementary school kid wouldn’t be able to hold on to one for very long), the lunch ladies generally knew we were the free lunch kids so the card became almost superfluous.
Here’s the deal though that I am sorta missing. We were ALWAYS the poor kids. It was the norm. We didn’t suddenly become poor and embarassed by our sudden drop in school status to free lunch kids. It wasn’t embarassing to get the free lunch because… it wasn’t a free lunch… it was lunch.
On occasion, my mom would scrape together an extra quarter for a Cheerio or, on a really good month, a buck or two for something from the Scholastic Book Club. In general, however, it was free breakfast and free lunch and dinner when I got home. It was KMart tenny’s and cutoff shorts from Goodwill. It wasn’t embarassing, I wasn’t ashamed. I had been doing it the entire time I was in school. I didn’t know any different. It was… life.
I tend to the think the hand wringing over the fragile egos of today’s youth might be a bit overdrawn. They are tougher than we give credit for. IF they are truly hungry, they’ll eat.
First, I’m cynical enough to suspect that food stamps, free lunch programs and (increasingly) free breakfast programs have far more to do with subsidizing Big Agriculture than with feeding allegedly starving children.
Second, I’d have thought that, if there’s ONE task even the poorest parents ought to be able to carry out, it’s giving the kids breakfast before school.
Instead, the school system seems to be saying to poor parents, “Don’t bother feeding your kids. We’ll take care of that. In fact, don’t bother doing anything. That’s all our job.”
Kids MAY be better fed as a result, but there’s something else going on: schools are helping bad parents to become even WORSE parents by taking over even the minimal responsibilities those parents had.
I don’t think a lot of people understand how much of an investment this is. This is just as important as–more important than–roads and fire departments. A nation in which all of the children are well fed is a better nation for everyone. There are no losers.
This reasoning leads to the conclusion that there should be no school lunches at all, unless you think that having money to pay for a school lunch indicates one is probably a better parent.
If the parents are working a lot, or are too poor, they may not be able to buy or prepare the meals the kids need. Why should the kids then suffer from that? And why should the teachers and school suffer through that too?
I come from a place, already within the US, where school lunches have been the norm in decades. No cash registers, no machines. Grab your tray, grab your utensils, get in line, get your food.
To see all the people opposing this is quite sad.
Here are some examples on how the kitchens and meals look like. If it is from the sources “primerahora.com”, “elnuevodia.com”, “metro.pr”, it is from Puerto Rico.
And here, in Spanish, is the section of the Department of Education’s branch that deals with offering food services. And yes, part of what we get at schools is local produce.
That may be true, but as a teacher my wife saw way too many kids coming to school without having had any breakfast, and the fact that her school didn’t offer it did not make the parents provide it. So yeah, you can say it’s a parents basic job, but that doesn’t make the kids less hungry. Providing meals does, and it improves their academic performance and behavior.
You don’t have to cut additional programs if we 1) make school funding a real priority in states’ budgets, and 2) don’t throw a hysterical fit when some suggests a property or income tax increase. Here in Tennessee we had a few politicians suggest we raise our state income tax from a crushing burden of 0% to… oh, something higher; you would have thought they suggested raping and eating babies by the picketing and protesters. They were thrown out of office on their ear pretty quickly. Meanwhile Tennessee is ranked 44th in the US in education, while “Taxachusetts” is ranked 1st.
I’ll speak for me.
I think there should be a school program.
But I believe an unintended consequence of the lunch program is the belief by an increasing number of parents that this whole school thing writ large is the responsibility of the government, and all the parents have to do and sit back and enjoy the show.
I had this very similar discussion with a co-worker just yesterday and he felt that the education problem was 100% lack of government funding and 0% the lack of parent involvement.
I also think as the kids get older it teaches them that government is the answer. Because heh, I never had to pay for the food, or remember my wallet, the government just provides! How good is that!
I’m curious how ya’ll know she’s accurate. Did these kids tell her that they have free/reduced lunch? Or does she just suspect they might be. How does this even come up in conversation?
I’m surprised that this would even be a “thing” to notice based on how you’ve described the system. When I was in school, we had the different colored card system. But I wouldn’t have been able to tell you which kids were which because it wasn’t something I cared to think about. I guess I’m like your son.