It has become kind of fashionable in our little town to let the government pay for your kids breakfasts and lunches no matter how much money you earn.
My daughter tells me that more than half the bus gets off in the morning early to eat free breakfast at school, and these kids don’t come from the other side of the tracks either.
The easier you make it the more it will be abused, and believe me brother it is being abused big time.
I know the system is being abused, but can't for the life of me figure out how it is being done. Most people I know have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get any kind of assistance, of course they are also honest, law-abiding citizens that just need a temporary bit of assistance.
“Easy to be abused” doesn’t touch it. It is DESIGNED to be abused.
I first ran into this in the 80s. Had two kids in a fairly prosperous rural district. Start of the year, I had completed a survey, turns out I qualified (barely) at 200% of poverty for reduced price lunches. Thanks, but no thanks says I. One kid packed his own lunch, the girl, I could afford.
The district stayed on my case to accept for both kids, finally stirred my interest to look into it. Turns out, free/reduced price lunch is a “linch-pin” program. All sorts of other federal grants use the percentage of lunch/breakfast enrollees as a district’s qualifying standard for everything from special ed to God-knows-what. The district honchos didn’t give a rat’s if my kids actually ate the cafeteria garbage or catered Beluga caviar, the district wanted those stats as “poverty” cases.
Let me tell you a little story: About fifteen years ago on a fine summer morning I happened to turn the local tv news while dressing for work. I stopped, flabbergasted, when the cutie newsie reported breathlessly there would be “free breakfast and lunch served at several inner city schools†and “no card or payment of any kind would be required†and children “up to age 18 could eat freeâ€. And her last breathless words were, “It’s all free, it doesn’t cost anything!†These are the things that made me realize I was a conservative, and a pretty mad one at that.