True
The NextDoor community thanks you for your service.
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It stole that from Eleven!
From my local NextDoor:
Bump up the taxes a little bit and give all the kids free lunch, IMO
California is making this happen. Hopefully other states can follow suit.
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Kids need food. Letâs start teaching them at an early age that the government will give it to them. And the parents that send their kids to private schools, or people without kids in the schools wonât mind subsidizing this lesson Iâm sure. Heck, kids need breakfast too. What kid can learn well on an empty stomach. Schools should provide free breakfast too. And clothes, the schools can provide the kids with clothes too. But not school uniforms, that would be too âbrown shirtâ for most people. Kids need a warm, dry, safe, place to sleep. Kids need a stable home environment - public schools should just become boarding schools and parents should not have any responsibility for their kids, other than to breed them for the good of society.
Wow.
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A lot of kids are already getting free lunch (and breakfast too, in case you didnât know). Thatâs why this person on your NextDoor made this rant - he didnât come up with the âfree lunchâ idea on his own. Heâs pissed that he is paying for lunch for poor kids and then also has to pay for lunch for his own kids.
Food is important. It turns out that there are parents that canât (or wonât) feed their kids properly. It sucks, and it shouldnât happen, but it does. It is virtually impossible for a kid to learn when they are chronically hungry. Clothes and shelter are an issue to, and there are government agencies and charities and such that can help there - but food is a pressing issue every single day. The most efficient way to deal with it is through the schools, since the kids have to be there during breakfast and lunch hours anyway.
If the only two options are ânobody gets free lunchâ or âeveryone gets free lunchâ, the obvious correct answer is âeveryone gets free lunchâ. Most places are somewhere inbetween - some with a better ballance than others.
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I paid over $43,000 in FIT last year. I know people in this country received free food, subsidized food, subsidized housing, free health care, subsidized healthcare, etc. I know many people in this country are much less fortunate than me. I also know the price of living in a civil society.
I, along with many other tax-paying citizens in this country, are not posting on NextDoor also wanting free housing, free food and free healthcare. Whatâs up with school lunch (is it even food??)?
The only two options arenât ânobody gets free lunchâ and âeveryone gets free lunchâ just like the only two options arenât ânobody get free healthcareâ and everybody gets free healthcare" nor ânobody gets free foodâ and âeveryone gets free foodâ. The NextDoor poster is a whiner. She lives in an affluent suburb of a major metropolian city and in a very large single family suburban home. She can well afford to buy school lunch for her kid(s) or also send them with a nice brown bag lunch.
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Also, didnât the feds extend free lunch (and possibly breakfast) to all students during covid? I know that the schools around here did extend lunch to all students for free for a year or 2. It was really nice to not see the stories of lunch money shaming that showed up regularly before that.
I believe the Feds cut that off and now it is back to the states or local schools to decide how to handle it again. And with inflation, especially food inflation, it is definitely an issue again.
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Great. We are on the same page. The lady is someone who doesnât need to be listened to
FYI - the charter school I work for doesnât provide free lunch. The one my kids go to doesnât even have a cafeteria - you can order ahead and get things like pizza or Panda Exrpress or something on different days.
I would imagine that one of the reasons charter schools like these outperform public schools is because the kids that need free lunch canât realistically attend them. There is no official finacial barrier to entry, but there still is one hiding there.
No bus is another barrier. My school does have some busses, but the parents have to pay for it.
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Yes, for nearly all of the 2020-21 school year (depending on when school started because I think it was around Labor Day that it went in, but some schools started earlier) plus all of the 2021-22 school year every student, irrespective of financial need, received completely free breakfast and/or lunch if they wanted it. And there was a program to distribute free food, again irrespective of demonstrated financial need, to families over the summer of 2021.
In the Spring of 2020 I believe that all or most districts delivered free breakfasts & lunches to the kids on free/reduced lunch during the school year. Iâm not sure about the summer of 2020.
But all of the âirrespective of financial needâ programs are now over, as I understand it. So for the 2022-23 school year itâs back to being a matter of students qualifying for free/reduced lunches based on financial need. In other words, business as usual.
BTW, I got this info from the teacher down the street. She mentioned that a problem last school year was that families knew from the get-go that their kids would be getting free breakfasts & lunches regardless of whether they filled out the forms or not. So they didnât want to fill them out⌠either because they couldnât be bothered or they were embarrassed and there was no direct benefit to them.
But schools get extra funding based on the number of kids on free/reduced lunches. Apparently the schools were desperate for parents to apply for the free/reduced lunch even though they didnât need to and it was a whole thing. Iâm not sure how it shook out in terms of funding, but I think everyone pretty much acknowledges that the 2021-22 free/reduced lunch numbers are garbage.
Not so much for the 2020-21 school year because the program was announced after the forms were due, at least in my neighborâs school. (Maybe not everywhere though.)
Making it free for all eliminates the stigma for those in need as well as renders all the paperwork moot. Seems like a win-win. Too bad this couldnât get done at the federal level because of political tantrums
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My husband was a free school lunch kid. Free lunch kids got crappy shame lunches.
Our kids are in a district that provides free lunch (and breakfast) to all. My husband packs for our kids because he still has a lot of trauma from school lunches, but plenty of kids eat the lunch, even those who donât have to. Itâs nice.
Thatâs a lot better now than when I was a kid. When I was a kid the kids on free/reduced lunch had a special card they showed the cafeteria worker and they had to go through a certain line, which was always longer than the other lines and thus only the kids on free/reduced lunches used it, making them stand out. When they got to the front of the line theyâd show their card and the cashier would make a note on a paper. If they were on reduced lunch or were getting something that didnât qualify for the free/reduced lunch such as ice cream or orange soda then they would also pay a little, but way less than what everyone else was paying. Totally different process from the kids who were paying regular price (which is still subsidized) for lunch.
Nowadays all of the kids have identical cards that they (or their parents) can load with money. The free/reduced lunch data is on there too, but any kid can go through any line and if they get stuff that qualifies for the free/reduced lunch thereâs really no difference in the checkout process. I mean you could sit there and observe that Suzy never buys ice cream or orange soda, only the standard school lunch and milk or chocolate milk and conclude that maybe she doesnât have funds on her card that will work for ice cream or orange soda. But you could make that observation whether it was all kids or just the needy ones on free lunches.
You missed my whole point⌠the paperwork is NOT moot because the number of kids on free/reduced lunches gets used for a lot more than just figuring out which kids get the free & reduced lunch. The only thing that directly affects the parents is the free/reduced lunch, so thatâs their motivation to fill out the paperwork. But it absolutely helps the school in a number of other ways. Itâs in the schoolâs best interest to identify every kid who qualifies and that process didnât work very well for the 2021-22 school year because the parents had no motivation to cooperate.
Well for roughly 1.95 school years and the summer in between they DID get it done at the federal level, but it was intended as a temporary emergency Covid relief measure and the emergency is now deemed over.
My point was that they shouldnât need that data in the first place if they only use it to distribute more funds to offset the cost of reduced price lunches. If they use that data for other purposes maybe they should have a better way to collect the info they need. Simplifying the school funding system and making it more equitable across the board should be a goal everybody can agree on.
I understand the federal funding was for emergency purposes. My point is Congress should see how well it worked and make it permanent. Same with the expanded child tax credit.
They do. And yeah, they could probably work off some other metric, but it gets used for quite a lot that has nothing to do with food.
The well-intentioned program of providing universal free lunches had an unintended negative side effect. If we were to make that permanent then part of the project should be figuring out a good proxy for the free/reduced lunch data to use instead, or restructure a bunch of other stuff. That didnât happen last school year and caused some issues. I believe that in some cases they simply used the prior yearâs data, which isnât a good long-term solution.
I am in no way saying that we should or shouldnât do that⌠just pointing out a wrinkle that ought to be ironed out if things were to go that way.