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Feb. 27th, 2009 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
d_aulnoyOkay, 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 eatcake 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.
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
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.
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 12:00 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 12:31 am (UTC)'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 ....