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School Lunches
We are always told how important school lunch (and now breakfast) programs are for our communities; nevermind all of the churches, food banks, and other government programs out there to help the poor. We are supposed to believe that poor parents won’t feed their kids so schools need to do it for them. A few years ago New York City kept schools open during a blizzard because kids “don’t get a hot lunch and, in many cases breakfast, unless they go to school.“
Now we have a situation where schools are closed and students are engaged in remote learning from home. School lunches are handed out from the school parking lot now in my town.
While it is nice that the school found a way to provide this service during these strange times, there is one problem. Hardly anyone was going to get free food. This week the superintendent sent out a note pleading for people to come and take the food, regardless of your income level. Now, this program which was meant for the needy is open to everyone because people were not so needy that they would be willing to walk a few blocks to pick up their free food.
As a frustrated taxpayer I had to tell my kids, “Go get some of that!” So now we have Cocoa Puffs for breakfast and Chef Boyardee for lunch. I suppose I can see why the biggest problem for poor people in America isn’t hunger but obesity. Anyway, this is the first time in about four decades that I drank chocolate milk out of an eight once cardboard carton. And yes, I am a grown man with an above-average income drinking milk meant for underprivileged children . . . you got a problem with that?
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It’s a USDA program. Help the farmers by buying up cheese and dairy. So it gets bi partisan support in Congress..
When I taught in NYC we were told to get every kid signed up for the school lunch program, regardless of need. Like those first-days-of-school attendance numbers, it all translates into the amount of state aid a school receives.
Yes, At Back to School Night they always make a big push to get everyone to fill out the forms
This, of course, is why they hate homeschoolers, since we “take away” their money.
Thank you for discussing this topic, Vance. The practice of handing out lunch and breakfast out here, federally funded, no application needed or questions asked, really bothers me. They’ve been doing so for some time, and the governor mentioned poor people’s need for this program to keep feeding their kids during the shutdown. This is not to say that no one ever might need it . . . but surely, a program of this size that cranks out this many meals every day is not necessary.
To those public employees who administer it, the program is doubtless essential. The purpose of a government program is not to solve a problem, but rather to employ more public employees. If the program solves the problem it is supposedly intended to, then the program will go away, and who is that going to help? Certainly not the public employees! The larger the program can grow and the more public employees it can employ, the better the program.
I have a friend who has been going who offloaded excess on me. I had forgotten to buy milk. It’s been a week and we still have milk cartons in the fridge.
She calls it socialist lunch, which I find funny because she’s a homeschooling maven who keeps going. She’s been transporting extras to various shut ins in our church family.
Considering the response in my town, a whole lot of food, paid for by taxpayers, will be finding its way into the dumpster very soon.
I have long been skeptical of the “children are going hungry” idea. Thanks for a bit of evidence to back up my view.
Where did the moochers go? Someplace Else. It’s a nice place, Someplace Else.
Thanks. Always knew it was phony. At least kids who eat lousy food at home, get lousy food at school. I suppose that’s fair.
Our school district a few years ago started serving breakfast on carts to students between the first and second periods, as a way to guarantee that every student would be subscribed for the program and they’d get as much compensatory funds as possible. During the current COVID shutdown, they started out doing curbside meal handouts five times a week, but have since cut it back to handing out multiple meals just twice a week. I haven’t driven past lately, so I don’t know what the participation numbers are seven weeks after the shutdown began.
It’s all a con. Here the school system now delivers those meals…and, oh, two delivery employees tested positive for COVID.
I don’t even know what you are complaining about! Our kids (one in 8th, the other 10th) have been going over and getting the “healthy meals” now for a month. Their first trip they came back and said “It’s not a meal, it’s just breakfast snacks!” They still go get it, but they don’t get chef boyardee! They don’t get cocoa puffs! I’m totes jelly, bruh!
And I just noticed you also get rice krispie treats! You must live in one o’ them there rich school districts I always hear about!
Drew Klavan points out when Lord Acton said, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he meant systems where too much power (to feed children first lunch, then breakfast?? Who are these children who eat breakfast??? They’re certainly not related to my family!) is concentrated causes systemic corruption — not just among those wielding the power.
If you find yourself “a grown man with an above-average income drinking milk meant for underprivileged children,” you know you’re living in a corrupt system.
Big Government must be destroyed — to save our very souls.
I had a teacher friend explain this to me about charter schools many years ago. I was so baffled I simply didn’t know how to respond. Sometime later it occurred to me, “you want money for children you’re not even serving????” That’s just sick.
There are really some kids that need the extra food, but it should be on a “must need” basis. At 15 years of age I was in a foster home, where we just didn’t get enough food. There were 7 children in her home, and she gave one small scoop of each food she cooked on our plates and no more. Two meals on Sat and Sun. At that time they only gave school lunches for the needy children. I finally called the social worker in charge of that foster home and complained. The foster mother was investigated and lost her license. Most of us were put into the Sacramento Children’s Home, on Suterville Road, and we ate well.
Yeah, I had my eye on the rice crispy treats but the kids beat me to it. Considering what I pay in property taxes I don’t mind taking this stuff, but I would rather they just spend less to begin with.
I hear stories at the teacher level locally of some kids who really do go without food outside of their school day (or new clothing), so there is an issue to address. But as with most government programs, bloat is the natural occurrence, and over the past decade, because the school meals are tied by the feds to a funding formula, the effort isn’t simply to sign up the kids to really need the breakfasts and lunches — every child has to be signed up, even during the period here in West Texas that saw record growth in oil drilling activity that carried over into doubling and tripling of average incomes (i.e. — if the current bust last for a while, the school meals might have seen more natural growth, but you won’t know because they’ve already put every child on the program).
I read somewhere that universal “free” lunch was part of Michelle Obama’s lunch program initiative. Because it was shaming kids who needed the meal to single them out from kids who didn’t. The great leveling.
I think this is just bologna sauce. As a 15-16 year old, I didn’t feel embarrassed or singled out to get free lunch, just grateful. And the school office gave us lunch tickets just like everyone else had.
I agree. And what you point out is true of any bureaucracy, public or private. The difference being that in private the bureaucrats eventually have to account to the bottom line. In public there is no bottom line accounting to contend with.
The problem is that if when you only provide food to the kids who actually need it the program can be even more expensive in jurisdictions where there are few truly needy kids. The overhead costs of such a program mean that you need a critical mass of kids using the program in order to keep the “cost-per-kid” at an acceptable level. The fewer the kids using the program, the higher the cost-per-kid.
Personally, I’m baffled by the very idea of schools being responsible for feeding kids at all. Up here in the Great White North kids never see a cafeteria until high school. Everybody is expected to bring a bagged lunch and they eat it in their classroom. At least, that’s how things worked up until the early 1990s when I was still a student.
[Misthiocracy runs to DuckDuckGo…]
Welp, it looks like Ontario does now have a “Student Nutrition Program”, but it’s administered by non-profit NGO agencies rather than by the schools themselves, and largely run by volunteers.
http://www.children.gov.on.ca/htdocs/English/professionals/studentnutrition/studentnutrition.aspx
Our local district was quick to dump Michelle’s school lunch program, and because we’re not in a PC part of the country, the people running food services weren’t shy in telling everyone they got rid of it because they food she and her people recommended was going straight from the food tray to the trash can, because they didn’t give a thought to what children would eat, but what the Obama Administration thought they should eat. It was a gianorums waste of taxpayer $$$, which in itself should be food for thought for anyone wanting a National Health Care system with top-down federal edicts (but that’s a topic for another day….)
The programs to feed children breakfast, lunch, and more recently proposed dinner and weekend meals at school weakens family ties, and, along with several other things kids now get at school like medical and dental care, weakens the bonds between children and their families, and may cause children to bond more closely with the school than with the family. Those programs also reduce the incentive for parents to exhibit good parental behavior and to learn better parenting.
The not nice part of me (which could be lumped in with “conspiracy theory” except that there is more than a little evidence) says that such programs are intentional parts of the long term Progressive program to eliminate family ties and to replace those family ties with ties to The State.
I think some schools in Austin offer breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
That’s because it is exactly what is intended.
Something like that starts from the reality that there are some bad parents out there, and extrapolates out to the idea that everyone’s a potential bad parent, so the state needs to take over the job completely.
Austin ISD’s the richest school district in Texas, in terms of ‘surplus’ money it has to send back to the state for redistribution to poorer school districts, unless the district can find programs and projects that the state (and the federal court overseeing things) approve of as justified expenditures. Not sure if school dinners fall under the ‘justified’ label, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it did.