Posted on 06/11/2015 3:35:41 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
There is a simple solution to ensuring that every child receives a nutritious meal: provide taxpayer-funded free lunches for all of them.
During my year as an elementary school kitchen manager, kids came through my lunch line without money for all kinds of reasons: Some lost the check their parents had given them. Some had divorced parents who weren’t communicating. Others had single parents who just got busy and forgot to give them money. My school district mandates that, after three incidents in a row, kitchen supervisors take away that child’s hot lunch and replace it with a slice of cheese on a bun. I refused to do that, and was fired.
My school district isn’t unique. Across the country, schools are using cheese sandwiches to punish children for lunch debts. They say it’s necessary to balance cafeteria budgets. Not only is a cheese-sandwich meal unhealthy, it’s humiliating. Children are teased by classmates who perceive them as “poor.” Others cry as they watch their hamburger and French fries swapped for a slice of cheese. I saw one first grader choose to go hungry rather than suffer that shame....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I know. And politicians and principals often get a slice of action.
“I bet all prisoners would like an upgrade”.
In our county, the food processed for the county schools are also processed for the Detention Center. I laughed myself sick when I found that out on a “field trip” with one of my kids. The irony of it is sad.
This article is intended to soften up minds about the next hill on the liberal agenda: free and compulsory meals for children. It will be of the quality of free and compulsory education, although people would never accept food as toxic as the education they accept from the government. Poison works faster on the body.
Liberals are hopeless, so I would ask conservatives: do you send your children to public school? If you do, are you not straining at cheese and swallowing a curriculum?
Don’t participate in this rotten system. You want free stuff for their stomachs, try the nearest restaurant dumpster. You want free stuff for their minds, turn on the tv.
And then remember, garbage in, garbage out. When your kids reach voting age — and voting will then be free and compulsory — how do you expect they’ll vote?
We’re obviously talking about White Privileged kids. They must pay their way and also for the others.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3296732/posts
These links to two prior articles from last week say that she often paid for the lunches herself.
-PJ
My son has reported to us that some of his buddies think we’re rich because he gets Oreos and Rice Krispie treats in his lunch. He often trades the kids for other stuff (which we used to do). I’m waiting for the day when we get told we can’t put that in his lunch because it’s making the other kids unhappy and feeling inadequate.
That’s what happens when the government doesn’t get credit for the charity.
A jam sandwich. A cold slice of cheese jammed into a dry naked bun!
1. This is not a "poor" issue. The "poor" kids are on free lunches anyway, so not paying is not an issue.
2. Charity IS being provided, in the form of a cheese sandwich and milk. The kid is not "starving".
3. This is totally an irresponsibility issue. Parents being irresponsible, kids being irresponsible. Someone being irresponsible somewhere in the process. If you can't be responsible, you deserve the consequences.
How about pack your own lunch?
When will people learn there is no “free” lunch. Someone pays for the “free” lunch. Children need to learn this at an early age. I know they are helpless victims but they need to learn the fundamentals of life. Our welfare state has made them too dependent on government.
The lunch lady probably wasn’t fired because of this issue. The whole story is crap.
That being said, the waste in the school lunch programs are tremendous. More food is thrown away uneaten and unopened than you would imagine. Surely the child needs to start making friends and mooch some food from them.
OK I know that is bad advice, but my generation never starved because we learned to survive lunch period. It was like a swap meet in there. My old friend Larry, not his real name, used to go around asking do you want your this and that until he had enough to eat or trade for something better. If he still wasn’t satisfied, he made a second sweep near the end of the period to scarf up the leftovers. Give him half your tuna sandwich and you had a friend for life.
Today, with the adoption of FLOTUS’s healthful nutrition program, I don’t think Larry would survive his early childhood to pursue a successful career in auto sales.
“But I do not agree that the answer is to provide tax payer funded free lunches for every child. I also think that rules against brown bagging are beyond stupid. “
I think the rules against brown bagging are actually the key issue here. Once the school prohibits parents from sending lunch with their kids, policies like this school’s cheese sandwich policy become almost extortion. The school is essentially saying, “You can’t send your child with lunch, so either pay us money, or we will feed your child a terrible, wholly inadequate lunch.”
Yep.
In earlier articles, she said she paid for the meals “when she could”, but if she couldn’t, she gave the child the meal anyway.
In some schools if the cafeteria monitor catches them with such unhealthy things, they take it away! It is amazing what lengths they stoop too.
Very simple and workable solution to the entire situation had the manager and principal thought it out. Schools have had a decades old policy of withholding report cards if room fees, library fines, etc were owed. Simply record the meal being given in a ledger and give the child a meal. Inform the parents of the debt. The school system gets paid for the meal and the child gets a needed nourishment or rather before Wookieism used too anyway. Liberals make simple mole hill problems with simple common sense solutions into mountains.
Being also disabled myself; ICAM with what you have written.
Hmmmm.
How many other infractions did this lunch lady have? I am always suspicious when I hear the “I was fired simply because I did this.”
If so, she was in the right. But the tone of her article leads me to believe she simply chose to disobey the school’s policy because she believed it was right to do so.
It might very well be less expensive to just give free meals to all rather than to track who pays and who doesn’t. But somebody can run those numbers. Before we change a policy we need to talk numbers.
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