Obviously starve the children so as to give their parents a sharp rebuke! 
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Growing up in a progressive and prosperous country with a strong social safety net more than a decade before the “free”-market fundies got their footholds in the West? Better believe you were lucky. Not to downplay the efforts of your very impressive mother, but even disciplined single moms with two kids have more hurdles to overcome in the U.S. in 2019.
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And so affluent cheaters are allowed forgiveness and there’s no enforcement for absconding their financial responsibilities? You understand the problems we have as a country today, no?
Look, again, if it’s the answer, I’m fine with all school-age children being provided free breakfast and lunch. I don’t want to see kids go hungry. But it’s pretty galling that there is no effective enforcement of those with means either a) abusing their kids by not providing lunch or b) kids of wealth abusing the system. Everybody assumes that these lunch debts are about discrimination against poor kids, and that’s just not what’s happening the vast majority of the time.
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[Citation Needed]
You’ve been spouting that same line in every post so far in this thread and you’ve yet to provide a shred of evidence to support it. Oh, and by the way, this isn’t evidence:
Because I happened to have the post in front of me when your edit came through. The original text in that post was
So either you’re pulling numbers out of thin air to support your narrative that “the vast majority” of kids affected by lunch debt policies are either freeloaders or children of freeloaders.
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or…
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You’ve discovered a source of some amazingly precise data on the topic (3.7%) but for some reason you don’t want to cite it here.
I was foolish to engage you, because this, from your first post in this thread
was a reliable sign your mind is never going to be changed on this topic.
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Even if this is true -maybe it is-, the students who will feel the effects of strong policy are minors. Should they be subject to stupid adult tricks? No. I think the price to pay is small. Yes, this is the “but think of the children” argument. I think it applies here. I love the kiddos and don’t think they should suffer any more than they already do at the hands of negligent adults.
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I took j9c’s Map the Meal pertaining to Hennepin Valley at face value, as it had been called out above by both j9c and davide405, and responded immediately. The takeaway there is that 70% of “at-risk” students are covered by the national programs, and 30% are “likely ineligible”.
I created that post directly referencing that 30% were not eligible, but I quickly realized this was wildly in error (even though it supported my position!) and edited my post.
The Wikipedia article on Hennepin County indicates that 24% of the population is under the age of 18, and the current population is 1,152,425. Assuming an at-risk population in Hennepin County of 35,590, there are then several segments:
The total under-18 population per Wikipedia, 24% of 1,152,425 = 276,582.
Assuming that ages are evenly distributed, there would be ~211,503 in K-12.
The number of students classified as at-risk via the link is 35,590.
70% of those students are eligible for low-income meals, 24,913.
30% are at-risk but not eligible, 10,667.
This seems to indicate that:
Around 12% are completely eligible for free lunch
Around 5% are at risk (the 5% cited in my revised post, as age distribution is difficult to determine, but that should be the high number).
Around 83% are neither eligible for free lunch or at risk
Even with these revised numbers, we’re still talking about 5% of the students who aren’t covered by the national lunch programs or not considered at risk.
You are correct that I edited my post from a knee-jerk reaction looking at the data on a link someone else provided, and then revised it on a more considered look at the demographics - which even better supported my argument.
As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m OK with just giving all school-age kids free breakfast and lunch at school. However, as I’ve said repeatedly, I bristle at having to do this for students (or the parents of those students) who are of means to afford those lunches and choose to inconvenience the school district instead.
This isn’t about providing food for the poor. That’s just not the issue, I don’t disagree that we can’t or shouldn’t provide food for those at risk. It’s about enforcement for the negligence of the rich, or the exploitation of the poor by the rich, which is perhaps the greatest issue, especially in light of the Trump tax cuts, that our country faces right now.
Feed the poor. Ensure the rich are on the hook. Leave the middle class out of it. That’s all I’m asking, and somehow that’s a contentious statement here. I really don’t get it. I’ve gone to great lengths to explain my position and how few are at-risk or shamed by these policies, including this post, while nobody else here has provided any other viable solution that supports the poor while keeping the rich on the hook.
Looking on the internet… boy that’s stupid must be Florida… oh, Minnesota… well maybe some rural… oh, Twin Cities… well maybe some charter… no public… well maybe a different suburb… no Richfield… WHERE I LIVE! (I’m very disappointed.)
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Easy. Tax them. Use it to feed the poor and relieve the burden of the middle class.
I.e., school lunches are the wrong battleground for this National Drama.
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Can we not just increase property taxes? No seriously, I lean center right, but take my money. I get at least 4 calls a week from my son’s school about donations or fund raising…fuck that noise. How much would it cost me to not have you call me all the time? Public school is supposed to be a public service and my taxes should cover it. No bonds, no sales tax increase, just up property or income tax. Seems fair enough to me.
Besides the logistics of running a school cafeteria seems insane. My kid buys his lunch a few times a week, but it’s not like I have to tell them when. The lunch line doesn’t run out of hamburgers. It’s not like when I was in college and they shifted from meal to meal. The extras where just placed out and you took what you wanted. (It was all you could eat anyway.)
As far as pocketing lunch money…is this the 90s? It’s all digital now. I mean in highschool I didn’t eat breakfast or lunch and I pocketed the money. My parents knew this, I wasn’t food poor, literally no one asked my why I didn’t eat lunch. But then again I was fat…I doubt anyone thought the fat kid was starving.
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You reminded me of a crazy “solution” put in place years ago by my school district. There was an unusually large group of students two years younger than I was at the time. To make room, they put one class into the elementary schools (K through 4 became K through 5). The large grade 6 class was assigned half of the school building previously used by grades 5 through 8, and they built a new cafeteria.
Only the grade 6 students were allowed to use the cafeteria, because they had a full school day and the rest of us were on split sessions (7AM to noon or noon to 5PM). The new cafeteria was on the same side of the building as the older students, who could smell the food they weren’t allowed to eat. Of course, a record number of infractions were handed out to students caught buying snacks, eating, or bartering with younger kids for their lunch. Bureaucratic madness indeed.
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Speaking as a taxpayer in a district with really high taxes, I’ve got a better idea. How about they change priorities in how they spend/allocate the tax money? Every kid gets an iPad in my district, FFS. Food first, tech second (or not at all, if there’s no funds left after all the other basic needs have been met).
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The school lunch room employees are usually not employed by the school district, but rather by the private, for profit, large corporations like Marriott that have privatized school cafeterias. Like most such large corporations they believe skilled workers are beside the point, they buy crap pre prepared foods that just need heating up and pay minimum wage to their workers to maximize profit. The ONLY brief the employees have is maximum profit. If we want this entire system to change we could start by fully funding our schools, and making public employment the domain of skilled knowledgeable workers who earn a living wage and aren’t disposable commodities. The district likely had no input into any of this, other than picking the lowest bidder for the lunch contract.
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Thank you for taking the time to show you’re actually attempting to find some data to support your position.
This is what I said earlier
We’re both using proxies for the actual data, which would be found not by extrapolating from food insecurity rates, but by surveying the parents of the students who are affected by the application of the lunch debt policy.
For the sake of discourse, let’s use your numbers.
That is not a contentious statement.
From one side of your (metaphorical) mouth, you’re saying the thing that everyone else in the thread can agree with, namely that all meals at all public schools should be free for all students.
But then, from the other side of your mouth, you keep defending a policy that literally takes food out of the hands of kids and dumps it in the trash. Using your numbers about 5% of those kids are being wronged by that policy.
It is factually correct to state that 95% of an arbitrary population is a “vast majority.” Can we please not be quite so bloodless when we’re talking about hungry kids?
Is 5% acceptable collateral damage in your quest to punish the freeloaders? Do you want to be the one to explain that to the 10,667 kids who might have their hot lunch taken away from them because their mom had to fix the transmission on the car so she could keep her job, and so she’s got a couple weeks behind on their lunch card at school?
Nearly everybody, including you, appears to agree on the solution for the part about supporting the poor.
The thing that has you isolated in this thread is your obsession about the “keeping the rich on the hook” thing.
I think most of the rest of us agree with
Can we just leave the kids out of this?
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Look, if they didn’t throw the food out then the people that paid for their lunches would be losing here. … or something spitefully dickish like that.
Look, to do anything else would make baby supply side jesus cry.
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Not all Latinx people are Latinos/Latinas, either.
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It’s interesting to see how easily some people can start arguing that No Child Left Behind goes too far, and that it should instead be 5% of Children Should be Left Behind/Starved/Fed to Sharks.
Get kids food. That’s always more important than “I accidentally fed a kid that didn’t need it when I was feeding kids that needed it.” When we have a system where everyone’s eating, get back to me with how to catch sandwich bandits, but not before.
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Not unless that money goes into a national fund. Property taxes to fund local needs is a perfect way to under-serve the poorer areas of one’s society.
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You seem to be asking whether it was humans or an actual building. It was the former.
The cutoffs for free and reduced lunch are based on federal poverty guidelines and are a poor measure of actual poverty. Assuming a household of 3 people, the cutoffs for annual income for free lunch 27,729 and 39,461 for reduced. Given that the median rent in cities like NYC and San Francisco are hovering near 4,000 a month, even a rent of half the median would consume more than the full income of a family at or near one of the cutoffs.
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