When you outlaw hunger, only outlaws are hangry…or something like that.
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Texas did a Robin Hood law (I’m going to oversimplify here) where they spread out the tax revenue from richer cities and gave to the poorer ones.
Then the richer communities figured out that they could get their city councils to keep their tax rate suppressed and just do LOTS of school fundraisers which the poor cities couldn’t touch the funds.
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No. It is public shaming of CHILDREN. An extreme and unwarranted shaming of a child. People who do not have fully developed executive brain function. Who have poor impulse control. Just give the kid the goddamn hot lunch, tell them their parents will be receiving a call about their lunch money by the end of the day, call the parent and explain. If they are eiblible for free or reduced lunch, help them figure out the paperwork. They might not know or be incapable of completing the paperwork because of a language or literacy barrier. If they are not, help set them up on the school lunch program where the kid never sees the money. ETA: Or just do the rational thing and provide free breakfast and lunch to every kid who gets in line.
A family of 3 living on 40k a year may not have $500 to spend on lunches. Sure. If they have to pay only for food, rent, transportation, and clothing, they might be golden. How about the families with massive debt (like from a theiving private college) or medical expenses or just plain bad decisions. Why punish the child? The kid didn’t make those decisions and they have no control over family finances.
Maybe there was an emergency and there just wasn’t any bloody money left until payday. at that level of income in most places in the US a flat tire can fuck the entire month. What if they are the kids of an adult with drug abuse or alcohol problems? Or sheer negligence that doesn’t rise the level where CPS intervenes?
In 2018 7.1% of households had kids suffering from food insecurity. That is 2.7 million households. USDA ERS - Key Statistics & Graphics
There are so many reasons why a a child might not have lunch money. None of them justify or excuse publically shaming the kid.
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I’m not so sure about that assessment, given all the perpetual back and forth in nearly every comment, which always seems to circle back to hand wringing about ‘the affluent’ being “victimized” somehow, rather than the actual kids who are going hungry.
Stop; you’re making too much sense, and being far too compassionate, rather than just virtue signaling and trying to “win” the argument.
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children are going hungry because of me
it is my fault
if only I could play this online video game better
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Gotta teach the poors a lesson. Let’s start with harassing defenseless children.
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Sweet FSM, this cannot be repeated often enough! True for both me and Mr. Kidd, though his parents were an order of magnitude worse than mine.
@Chaz1: You’re in the best position to affect change in the school district. Vote for a better board, or if you’re able, run for a seat yourself. At minimum, let the school board know how you feel about this shameful waste of food in service of cruelty.
On a more personal note, I’m relieved the school in question is not my suburban Twin Cities high school.
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Instead of hang wringing and appeals to emotion, how about a pragmatic argument? We’re paying taxes in order to support public education. If some students aren’t having breakfast or lunch at school, they are going to worry about their empty stomachs instead of the lectures that we have paid for.
So in order to not throw away our tax dollars on an ineffective system, I propose we feed every hungry student. As a compromise for the affluent I am willing to accept that we extend that program regardless of economic background.
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Thanks pedant. I was asking if the school administration made a policy or if the lunch lady was mean.
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“I bristle at having to provide textbooks for students who are of means to afford those textbooks”
“I bristle at having to provide desks for students who are of means to rent those desks”
“I bristle at having to provide teachers for students who are of means to pay tuition”
We could make this same argument about literally anything that happens at school
But we see this same food-and-money fight over and over because for some reason food is the one thing that schools expect children to trade money for
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Are you saying that we should reduce property taxes and increase Federal taxes? Essentially every child would get the same amount of funding nationally?
Even in NC there is a 10x variance between the poorest and richest counties.
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Without shaming how are these children supposed to learn to live the american dream and pull themselves up by their boot straps?
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Another side-effect of Texas’s robin hood laws? Practically every small town in Texas spent funds on building a new football stadium. I’m all for Robin Hood, after seeing how different the education resources are between wealthy towns and poor towns. But letting locally elected officials decide how to spend those resources guarantees that the funds will be spent on things that are popular, probably not on things which actually solve real problems - because producing popular things are the only way to stay elected.
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Well, I assumed that the compensation is not great for a job like this, which makes the behavior all the more confusing. They shouldn’t care at all about this,
I have voted for progressives and I will send each of my school board representatives an email. This is a black mark on the community that put Ilhan Omar into office. I think the National attention is also doing an excellent job.
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While your tone doesn’t lead me to believe you actually want them, 46% of schools report debt from reduced lunch students. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1499404619306487 More fundamentally thinking about the nature of poverty in this country and particularly the tricky space near the edges of assistance, poverty can be deeply episodic. If, as an example you are near a cutoff, but not below it, you are still probably in a precarious situation that a small emergency can break your budget. I grew up in a community where a lot of people, myself included, hovered near the line for free and reduced lunch. It was not at all uncommon for someone to end up in lunch debt because they didn’t have money.
If you could readily buy them in unit cost quantities you might have a point, but if say the hypothetical family of three is headed by a waitress, as an example, pay can be really unsteady and in aggregate they might clear income thresholds for the year, but sometimes a give week is too tight to buy a full loaf of bread and peanut butter and bags. Income and expenses are only reasonably stable once you are solidly middle class, it just isn’t true anywhere near the poverty line.
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BTW: this isn’t just this school, this isn’t just Minnesota.
Stories like this have been a constant drumbeat for the last few years.
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