My state provides lunch and breakfast for every student, regardless of income. And not just during the school year, in the summers as well.
>> Free school meals save parents $850 per year per kid and valuable time every morning.
>> Last school year, the program provided over 76.3 million breakfasts and 135.6 million lunches.
I'm okay with this, but aren't the families of the poorest students already getting SNAP benefits?
The other thing you see is the stereotypical kid going through line and getting a free lunchk, and then spending $4 on a bag of chips and a bottle of soda.
I'm also not a fan of programs like these that just pump money through evil companies like Sodexo.
I will not believe that the United States is serious about healthcare until drinks with added sugar or added sugar substitutes are no longer available in the schools
The rationales in the article make a lot of sense to me, and I don't really see a downside to streamlining things like that. Especially the reasoning that "everything else is free [to children]", so why run the lunch room like a business?
At Catholic school, lunch was fraught with peril for me. Firstly we had all the cute lunchboxes and peer pressure to have a good one (I got Star Wars, mostly.) Mom usually packed our lunches, and I hated Mom's food, so I grudgingly ate enough to stave off hunger, and discarded the rest (especially fresh fruit: oranges yuck!) I had no concept of this thing kids do where they trade food back and forth. In fact, I enjoyed no clique or circle of friends to eat with, so cafeteria time was distinctly unpleasant and lonely for me, and I longed to get outside, to the playground, ASAP.
We also had "hot lunch" which was fairly unhealthy stuff like Sloppy Joes. It was fresher and more appetizing than Mom's, so I sort of looked forward to it. It did cost, and we purchased little milk cartons too, and so there was definitely cash-handling involved in many school lunchtimes, on the order of dimes and quarters per day.
I don't know if 100%-school-provided lunch would've moved the needle on my nutrition at the time. But I was definitely developing poor dietary habits, and there was no sufficient adult oversight to prevent that slide.