School lunches shouldn’t be this difficult
July 2, 2015
Or that should say: Being a humane adult should NOT be so difficult.
This is the second story I’ve heard about kids and school lunches this week that’s got me wondering what is wrong with people and our system. If it’s accurate that this kitchen manager was fired solely for giving kids free hot lunch, because she didn’t think that “one slice of cheese on a hamburger bun and a small milk” was adequate nutrition, isn’t it time to really think about what on earth we’re spending money on here?
I went to look for the first story about a lunch worker taking away a kid’s hot lunch and throwing it out, but instead I find that this is an ongoing issue and an active policy.
Schools are always battling shrinking budgets but at the end of the day, shouldn’t the health of the kids be a top priority!? How can students be expected to learn when malnourished?
This just reignites all my sense of the unfairness of life for young kids whose family lives are disrupted, plagued by poverty, illness, or bad decisions.
So the school not only already lost the money on the lunches, it also then gave the kids milk and fruit? Which is probably more expensive than the cost of the hamburger or spaghetti or whatever. Yep, that’s great financial sense.
Right!
School lunches aren’t really a thing here, at least like they are in the US (AFAIK). But do kids still go hungry, absolutely. This cool thing started up last month and seems to be getting traction: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/small-business/69236398/eat-my-lunch-startup-to-feed-children-in-need
Also was watching Jamie Oliver in Italy (or whatever his latest show is called) and omg, the school lunches in some of those places! AMAZING. One of the cooks said that a McDs opened up in town but shut after a couple months because nobody wanted to eat there. Ha.
Munchery does the same thing, though I don’t think they target kids specifically, so it does make me feel better about ordering from them. Kids going hungry just hurts my heart. Honestly, people going hungry makes me sad. That was a problem for Mom’s generation/family and it resonates.
I live in the UK and the school lunches here are dire, apparently they used to be good but during the Thatcher era they became very bad because of the cutbacks to school budgets. I have cousins who live in France and they said that their school lunch was amazing. Honestly, it’s really sad that children’s health are not a priority in some countries.
That is incredibly sad that the US and UK are so backward about such important things. š
I remember reading an article that if you took all the money that was being used to pay personnel that figured out which kids did / didn’t qualify, you could in many districts just as easily just give ALL the children free lunches. Admin costs are high and the food they distribute is cheap.
I would be very interested in that article, I wonder if the math is accurate.
The teacher in this article and the school mentioned are in a suburb of Denver. It’s been quite the uproar here. I totally get why she did it and I’m appalled that they’d take her job. I remember being on school lunches and always being SO hungry. From first through fifth grade, you could buy a chocolate milk for .30 cents in the afternoon and I would cry if I didn’t have the change.
So you know that she really did lose her job? I am also appalled! Heart breaks for those memories and those kids. I was on school lunches and would have been starving too if I hadn’t been used to eating so very little at that age.
When I was going through school, lunches cost anywhere from 30 cents to 1.00. and they seemed to be OK lunches. The entirety of my growing up I was either on free or reduced pay. The school’s fare was a good amount of healthy, and very little junk food until HS. I really liked my high school’s Burritos, though. The quality of food has severely degraded, and the price has definitely gone up way too far. What this woman did was humane. It’s terrible she lost her job over it.