(no subject)

[d_aulnoy]

Okay, so the whole cheese sandwich debate: at the risk of sounding heartless, are you kidding me?  

A) That is exactly what I ate as a child, because that is what my mother packed for me, because the oily, greasy, fatty, nasty "hot lunches" horrified me as a child and I was a picky eater. 

ETA with an Ai) - It was also what I ate because school lunch was grossly overpriced when compared to the home-made kind.  I may be coming from a relative place of privilege, but not the kind that I may have initially inadvertently indicated.  I am not providing a variant on let them eat cake cheese sandwiches!

B) That is better than what I eat now, when I pack my own lunch, and generally forget to include either the fruit or the nutritious beverage.

C) Still no scurvy.

I vote we cancel out the shame of the "poor kid" lunch by just providing everyone with a tasty cheese sandwich, and move on.  Good lord - there are teachers selling advertising space on their quizzes to fund book purchases out there, and we're criticizing the schools for effectively feeding everybody?  They succeed in their social function ... if not their educational function. 

In short: shut it, fellow liberals; you're making the rest of us look, if not bad, then at least damned silly. 

An ETA to an initially flippant post, because I don't want to give the wrong impression with this: I am not saying that our educational system is fine, or that there's nothing to worry about, or that this is a tempest in a tea-cup.  I'm not saying that a separate-but-equal system of school supplies is acceptable: I'm appalled by the striations that we see between school districts and between the resources that kids receive within individual schools on the basis of socio-economic class. 

I'm saying a school which feeds children on its own dime - not through state monies, not through subsidized lunches provided through the programs for which one has to qualify but from its established and undoubtedly already stretched funds - is to be commended.  I've seen a lot of suppositions that the cheese sandwiches are being provided to "shame" the parents via their children, and barring any actual evidence to support this reading, I'm calling nonsense.  If, practically speaking, the school's options were to keep sinking deeper and deeper into the red with each unpaid-for lunch until they had to take more drastic measures (firing teachers? canceling book orders? fill-in-the-blank with your own worst-case scenario here, but in my old school district, it wasn't unusual for parents to supply the toilet paper ... and god help us all if they didn't), or to maintain the kids dignity by not giving them "charity food" and, I assume, just letting them quietly gnaw at their own entrails or providing less expensive but still nutritious food for their students, I say Door #3 was the best of a bad lot of options. 

After brouhahas like the national misunderstanding of David Howard's choice of "niggardly" as a budget descriptor, and after the misapprehension concerning intentions in the Oakland Ebonics controversy, after  some people apparently took Jocelyn Elders statement that "perhaps [masturbation] should be taught" as some kind of a "lefties to the left!" edict, I've tended to take even the most well-intentioned of public outcries with a grain of salt.  Consider this my salting of the cheese-sandwich-with-a-side-of-deliberate-shaming, is all. 

Comments

[regyt.livejournal.com]

Well, the shaming is the issue, not the content of the lunches, I'd think. Sounds like a fine lunch to me, but dealing with that sort of social stigma is especially hard for kids.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

And I understand that, because I grew up ... shall we say, unencumbered by wealth? But at the end of the day, that's really not the school's fault, and short of magically finding a very large budget surplus in the couch cushions so as to treat everybody to the repugnant hot lunch, I'm not sure how they could reasonably be expected to mitigate it.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

Sure, I do understand that. Not many choices when there's a tight budget, and there's always a tight budget with schools. Cheese sandwiches for all sounds like a decent plan, really.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

You missed the point that it is a deliberate attempt to shame the parents through the kids. It is meant to be punitive and humiliating.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing: I don't think I did. I've seen a number of commentators reading it that way, but I think it's a stretch. The sandwiches are provided to children whose parents have not provided food for them. What alternatives do you see - the school not feeding them at all, thus sparing them the shame of the cheese sandwich? Going further into the black and firing a teacher or two to make up the difference? It's a sad commentary on American public policy that we don't feed *all* our children gratis, but given existing circumstances, it looks like administrators are doing the best they can ....

[fjm.livejournal.com]

It costs more to exclude children from a programme.

Food is bought in bulk, buying two types of food costs more (i organise conferences, I have experienced this, every option you add, costs more in admin).

Those kids have to be tracked from week to week, and even day to day. If they pay today do they get the cheese sandwich or the hot lunch?

if the authorities wanted the money, they could go to court. Instead, they have chosen to humiliate the children.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

On organizing, I bow to your greater knowledge hastily and without a qualm - but from what I understood, it wasn't so much "tracking down" as it was a last minute "scanning their card, seeing it was in the red, and handing them a different tray." And, the thought of taking as many parents as it takes to rack up $300,000 of debt in lunch money - at 3 bucks a day, I'll guess less than a hundred bucks each - to court, well, it doesn't sound either cost-effective or even doable. I think one of the sources of frustration behind *all* the reactions is that there doesn't seem to be a solution which is ....

[fjm.livejournal.com]

You have to estimate how many of those meals you hold. You probably have to buy more hot food than you will serve. The canteens will waste a fair amount of hot food, and quite a few sandwiches.

So, if the sandwich is not cost effective, and it isn't even practical without wasting food, then the only reason left is to punish, and it is punishing kids, not parents.

What if the reason the parent doesn't pay is that they are already neglecting their kid? What if that hot meal was the only hot cooked meal their kid got?

[justbeast.livejournal.com]

Mmmm, cheese sandwiches. I could go for one right now :)

[moonandserpent.livejournal.com]

We had a "meal plan" so kids who didn't have money could get the same unnerving plastic foodstuffs as everyone else. Me? I stopped eating lunch. It was 6 months before anyone noticed and when they did, my parents supported my decision.

We too were "unencumbered by wealth" but my parents were far too proud to "take a hand out", so not eating lunch (which gave me a whole hour do read in the middle of the day) seemed the best option.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Ditto, actually. Wonder how many of us chose books as the other-other white meat.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I am very sorry but you are completely in the wrong here. You may have hated hot lunches. I did also. But that's not the issue and you cannot discuss social policy in terms of your preferences.

1. The imposition of the sandwiches is punitive. I doubt very much that the extra admin involved makes it cheaper. [In my school children who had free lunches had to line up in the classroom to get tickets, My mother complained and it turned out that this was the policy of the teacher, the headteacher put a stop to it instantly.]

2. There have been lots of studies about the connection between food and learning for children, and a hot meal produces better results. One consequence of this is that in poorer areas in the UK, many schools have a breakfast club to make sure that children who need it, get a hot meal at the start of the day.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Flippancy aside, I'm looking at it from the point of nutrition - breakfast makes a difference, yes, but hot vs. cold? That's news to me.

The schools are providing kids with the calories they *need* to make it through the day. They are not behaving in a wholly capitalist fashion at the expense of the children by denying them altogether, and I've yet to see anything other than public opinion to support the reading that administrators are doing this to use kids as tools to "shame" their parents. I know some politicians do think that way, such as that ass who wanted to deny AIDs testing to expectant mothers on the theory that watching their children suffer would better make them understand the consequences of "promiscuity." But I don't think that these administrators are using anything resembling that rationale: given the lamentable state of funding for education in the states, it strikes me as being a budget issue rather than anything more sinister.

The post was spurred primarily by irritation with the histrionic nature of the comments on the linked post: while this is just another sign that our priorities as a nation are hideously out of whack, focusing on this to the degree that we are strikes me as akin to rearranging the deck chairs.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Heat is a form of energy. Tell me: if you come out from the cold, what do you want? A hot drink or a cold one?

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

I know it may not seem like a big deal to you, but the point isn't the tastiness of the lunch, or it its nutritional value, or even the question of whether the kids should get food. It's about creating a public stigma, about setting kids apart.

I was always poor, and I always got free (later, reduced price) lunches. This meant I had to get in a separate line from the other kids, and that my lunch was the same every day: peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I used to _like_ PB&J. But people look at you and see what you're eating and immediately make assumptions about you--they assume your parents can't take care of you.

It's completely deflating, demoralizing, and depressing. It's a visual marker of your family's "failures." And for the record: I had a single mom, two kids, worked overtime, still not enough.

I'm not saying that we should let those kids starve--of course not--but they should get the same lunch anyone else gets. You should get the option of the hot lunch like anyone.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Oh, it is a big deal to me, in the sense of "this is an ongoing situation, that has sucked for decades, the requires attention - and never gets any." But I think the outcry over this specific situation is overblown and media-encouraged.

'Cause, see, I agree with you. I think we should lobby for more educational spending, and I think that that money should be applied to children's needs across the board, from books and facilities to nutritional requirements, for every student, regardless of background.

But, in the world we have right now, with a $300,000.000 deficit that was growing every day that the school provided hot lunches *not* to all children (one assumes there were kids who started with the baseline before the policy was enacted), but to children whose parents had indicated that the money would be coming from out-of-pocket rather than from the school's budgeted monies and then could not keep to that intention... what *should* the school have done?

I'm not trying to be argumentative here, *at all* - I honestly think they made the best of a crappy situation. Is there a better alternative? I suggested the sandwich-across-the-board option seriously - it's cheaper for all concerned, and it would make it possible to establish a level playing field while still maintaining some semblance of nutrition for students. All of the alternatives seem either impractical or - as with the starving option - a hell of a lot worse ....

[exquiscadavre.livejournal.com]

Mad applause