Yesterday Kim wrote about the kinds of cuts being made to education funding in our communities and states. At the same time that school budgets are being slashed, a number of families are in dire financial straits. One program that is really feeling the pinch of family finances is school lunches. From the NY Times:
The school district in Albuquerque was among several last year to start serving cold sandwiches and milk, instead of full hot meals, to students whose parents had not paid what they owed. In Wake County, N.C., those students may eat as many fruits and vegetables as they want, but not the rest of the lunch offerings.
In Louisiana, some districts did not feed the children whose parents were in arrears at all, until, in November, the State Legislature passed a law ordering that they be given at least a snack, while directing districts to notify child welfare authorities if a student got just a snack on more than three consecutive days. Framingham, Mass., hired a constable to hand-deliver notices to parents whose bills were still unpaid after the schools had sent them several letters alerting them to their debt.
At least in Albuquerque and Wake County the schools were feeding the kids. Withholding food from children is something I cannot begin to understand.
In NY City:
Since 2004, the city has absorbed at least $42 million in unpaid lunch fees.
But that is a luxury it can no longer afford, according to the Education Department, which has weathered several rounds of budget cuts, with more to come. The department has been telling principals to collect overdue lunch money or risk having it docked from their school budgets.
Of the city’s 1,600 schools, 1,043 owe a collective $2.5 million to the department for meals served in the first three months of this school year. That puts them on track to be $8 million behind by the end of the school year.
Penalizing children for the desperate financial straits their parents are in, combined with cuts to education is a sad, sad commentary on our national priorities.
Tags: Education, school lunch, state budgets
Raj Patel on why we shouldn’t cut food stamps to pay for school lunch programs as in the Senate’s version of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill, “in which an improved school meal program will be paid for by cutting back $2 billion in funding for food stamps in 2013”:
No one disputes that poor children need to be better fed, but government food stamp entitlements are the last tatters of a safety net for many millions of people. Evidence? Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that 50.2 million Americans were food insecure in 2009, a mere 1 million more than the year before. Although that’s still one in six people, the figure was a victory. Given the soaring rates of poverty and unemployment in 2009, there could have been considerably more food insecure people.
You’d think we’d be ashamed of those numbers.
We need to expand both SNAP and school lunch programs. That means rejecting the Sophie’s Choice between families and children. Behind the logic of paying for school lunches with food stamp funding is an assumption that, if poor families are sinking, “save women and children first.” The trouble is that cutting the food stamp program will hurt women more than men. Look at who goes hungry in the U.S.: over a third of all single-female-headed households who have children are food insecure. No other household demographic is as likely to be going hungry. So, cut SNAP and who gets hurt? America’s poorest women.
You’d think we’d be ashamed of that, too.
To put this all into perspective, we know from the OMB that the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts will be $5 trillion over the next ten years. American children are being hurt by hunger. Their families are too. The idea of choosing between them would be morally repugnant if, indeed, it were a choice—but what becomes increasingly clear when you look both at the economics and sociology of hunger is that you can’t save one group without saving the other. There is no Sophie’s Choice here—there are simply degrees of harm that we allow to be inflicted on the poor.
Our legislators are huffing and puffing to extend those tax cuts – while soberly shaking their heads and expressing their faux-sorrow that in these perilous economic times that we must all tighten our belts and accept some suffering. Will Congress really take food from the mouths of children so as not to inconvenience the rich?
Tags: nutritional assistance, school lunch
Something to think about:
Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.
The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
People in this country are generally agreed (not entirely, but mostly) that it’s a bad thing for kids to live in poverty or go hungry, so this study should give at least a few people some pause.
I had a moment a couple years ago that was something like being hit over the head—I read something about free and reduced-price school lunches, which was not a topic I’d given much thought to in recent years. I don’t remember what I read, but this is the basic information that stunned me:
Today, the United States Department of Agriculture spends $8.3 billion a year to provide free and reduced-priced lunches for 30.6 million children whose families are at or below 130 percent of the national poverty level, about $26,845 for a family of four. The program also provides reduced-priced meals for students who are between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level, or $38,203 for a family of four.
Because I knew quite a few kids in grade school who received free or reduced-price meals, even though I spent kindergarten through third grade in a neighborhood school that drew from a small area of mostly one- or two-family homes…a “good neighborhood,” you know? More to the point from how I saw things as a kid—because it’s not like I thought “oh, I live in a good neighborhood”—I largely missed the class distinctions between families. Everyone felt pretty much the same to me. In fifth and sixth grade, when we were transferred to a larger school, I could have pointed out the poor kids. But it turns out that even in my little neighborhood school, I had classmates whose families were seriously struggling. And in my childhood obliviousness I really gave no thought to what it meant that they paid less than the 90 cents or so that was full price at the time.
Since the free lunch article I excerpt from above is about high school students not taking their free lunches because of the stigma attached, I guess my obliviousness was a good thing at the time. But it goes to show that when we think about poverty and hunger and how the economy is organized to address those things, we have to shake off our obliviousness to realize that these things are more widespread than perhaps we realize.
Tags: food stamps, poverty, school lunch
