Sounds like a good time to donate to food banks.

Nicolek for the win. Exactly.

The point of life is not to be a government-bot. To say that 'We should do something about this terrible problem' does *not* mean that we should do it through government.

I grew up in a religious household and turned away from it early… But late enough to have learned that there are much more powerful exemplars of decency and kindness than policy.

For the first half of this school year all kids at our schools got free lunches. You didn't have to be poor. You didn't have to show need. You didn't even have to show up or even be enrolled. You could pickup two meals each day and take them home for every person in your family under 18 if you have one child that is eligible to be enrolled at that school.

The school also suggests that parents donate up to $60k each year. We are not a poor district. But you can't hurt people's feelings by only helping those in need. Instead it is better to waste +90% of the funding. Or so they say.

Just whose job is it to feed my children?

Make no mistake about this: when government takes away the primary functions of parents, children are shown, not just told, that things come from government, not individual effort.

They are shown, not just told, they have no need to respect you, your achievements, or your property.

This is how you get rioters burning your property and assaulting you because they don’t get enough from you… Through government.

I don’t have an objection to them feeding kids at school . I grew up in an era and a town in retrospect where I believe some of the children I went to school with really needed those free lunches.
it just seems to me that it is done in the most inefficient money wasting way possible.

And the irony is, the tax payer’s kids, pay the full nut, and the non tax payer’s kids are the ones that get the *free* food.

I think there should be a central kitchen somewhere in the school putting out an Americanized version of a Japanese bento. Stop with each school preparing a full meal for 200 or 300 kids, with the associated staffing and waste. Better yet. Contract it out to local restaurants or food service companies.

Several churches in our town participate in Hand to Hand, which I figured I'd learned in Basic. Nope. Something else.
They assemble donated food and purchased food. It is split up into anonymous...maybe Walmart...bags and distributed to the local schools on Thursday after school.
Each bag is hung on the coat hook of a kid who's on free or reduced lunch. This food is to be taken home and used over the weekend.

In addition to which, see "Feeding America" On line will have a couple of distribution sites near--say twenty miles--pretty much anybody, five days a week. Since Covid, you idle buy the distribution point and they put a goodish cartonof various foods into your trunk.

Last I knew, the semi bringing the food had about five tons. Most went to the folks lined up, the balance to various shelters in the area.

I've often thought that, Isab.

A couple years ago they passed a law saying all schools need a cafeteria (this had terrible unforeseen circumstances such as smaller schools in villages having to shut down because they couldn't meet the mandate, making those places less desirable but that's another story).

So they built a Middle School cafeteria but then more kids came and it was too small, and everyone is complaining, and the break is only long enough for the closest kids to go home for lunch. And it's too expensive to expand or build a new cafeteria.

There's a food truck that makes fresh pasta (sorry Amy) and sauce on Tuesdays and it has been a huge success! Every Tuesday the middle schoolers are lined up outside it. Right across the street from the school was a big empty building. It has since been rented out, but at the time I was like why don't they rent out that space and just use it as a hall, and bring in a bunch of food trucks? Or ask the local restaurant to set up a few bins of salad and a big container of soup?

There's plenty of parking... let a bunch of food trucks come in rent-free, and all the kids who can afford it will go there. The cafeteria can serve subsidized lunch to the poor kids. The kids who can walk home can do so.

It seems pretty obvious to me.

Let me say that I firmly believe that you should NOT choose, in advance, to have children unless you can provide for all the needed food, clothing, shelter, and even a few luxuries, not just for the kids, but your partner as well, in the event of accidents or diseases.

That said, we all know of cases where people had children because someone forgot to visit the drugstore in advance - and the couple didn't believe in abortion. (Obviously, married couples don't choose adoption either! Interesting how people often only understand that fact when it comes to MARRIED mothers...)

So what I'm getting at is that there has to be a way to keep the poor kids from getting forcibly recognized...and stigmatized. Contrary to what some sentimental adults like to say, mean kids don't necessarily torment people for being "different"; they torment them for being weak, vulnerable or being "inferior," since those are qualities that are obviously to be feared far more than just being "different."

Here's one story from 2003 that mentions briefly how one can get labeled that way. She is one of four children. Her family was plunged into poverty after her parents divorced.

(There are three other letters - one is by a mother who had a much-wanted child with her husband, only to see the boy turn near-psychotic, starting in kindergarten. He was grown by 2003, things were even worse, and she admits she would not have had him if she knew what would happen.)

https://www.salon.com/2003/05/10/breeding_readers_stories/

"Recently a letter writer accused the writers at Salon of being snobbish elitists for assuming that people who are financially incapable of supporting kids shouldn't have them.

"I'd like to respond that I don't believe in an inalienable right to reproduce as often as you wish, or at all, and I speak as one of four children of a divorced working mother.

"We always got the free school lunches (and had to carry lunch tickets specially marked with a red stripe so all the other kids could tell who the charity cases were), we wore hand-me-down clothes, and we were embarrassed to have Mom pick us up after school in the rusty, junky old car. My mother often worked two jobs, and sometimes cleaned friends' houses for extra money. Yes, there was a lot of love in the family, but it's easy for love to get buried under shame and resentment, when you're too embarrassed to let friends from school see where you live.

"When I was 13, I started working about 20-25 hours a week after school just to have money for clothes and books. There was never enough money ... I felt like I always, always, always had to work. I suppose poverty and hard work help build character, but it also breeds bitterness, anger and a pervasive sense of insecurity and shame. This has left me deeply ambivalent about creating children that I fear I won't be able to care for properly. And by properly, I don't mean having their own TV and DVD player and car, I mean growing up without a constant sense of the dread I felt. I just can't describe the horrible sense of knowing that at any minute our family could fall apart due to simple lack of money, or the utter shame of realizing that my parents were about as helpless in dealing with life's hard knocks as the children they were supposed to protect.

"I love my mother. She did the best she could do. It's just that sometimes I find it hard to understand, much less respect, the mistakes and decisions she made -- even when one of those decisions was me. Why on earth would you even want to have children you know you cannot afford? How selfish is that? What kind of life do you plan on giving them?

"I feel like my childhood was spent in a cloud of anxiety and tension that has carried over into my adult life. A large part of my decision to postpone, and possibly avoid, having children was my own impoverished upbringing. Call me selfish, but I think I've already made my sacrifices. Now that I'm finally, somewhat, financially stable at age 29, I want to relax and enjoy my life.

"I am not some snobbish elitist, just a kid who's been there. I think if you're poor and must have kids, have one -- not four."

(I assume that when she says "why on earth would you even want to have children you know you cannot afford" she also means "able to afford them before a divorce but not afterwards.")

Lenona, often the issue is not what you should have done. Maybe you shouldn't have had those kids. Maybe you shouldn't have drunk that soda. The list goes on and on. The issue is now that mistakes were made what do we do. Now that you have four kids you can't feed what should be done to improve the situation.

Bemoaning a past that cannot be changed is rarely productive.

I know. I thought I made that clear in my third paragraph. Segregating the poor kids who need free lunches just doesn't sound like a good idea. What if they're desperate not to let their classmates know how poor they are?

I don't think the lunches are free to everyone... people can still buy the cafeteria lunches if they have money. I don't know how the lunches are, I'm told they're pretty good so maybe a lot of kids will still go there anyhow. Or give everyone a ten franc voucher and let them buy where they want.

No NicoleK. The lunches for the last year here have been free to everyone. Even to the extent of sending home food to everyone. Most of that food ends up in the garbage.

Lenona, I don't see any reason to specifically mark someone out. But I also don't see any reason to put much effort into hiding it either. If you are that desperate to hide your poverty then perhaps you aren't hungry enough. The current local solution of wasting +90% of the welfare money is not a good solution.

That is why I don't feel too bad about this program going away or having a gap. I don't know how it is administered everywhere. But from what I have seen I suspect this is less welfare for kids and more welfare for the Sysco corporation.

“ I suspect this is less welfare for kids and more welfare for the Sysco corporation.” -Ben
I share your suspicion.
My kids refuse to eat the school lunches. I’ve heard they’re pretty awful. I keep money on their lunch accounts, in case they forget their lunchboxes or want to buy a milk or something, but they rarely get anything from the cafeteria. The fact that the lunches were free for everyone over the last few months didn’t make them any more appealing. I still ran into the other moms buying lunchbox food on Sunday evening.
I suspect that my fifth grader is aware of the socioeconomic aspect of all of this. She knows it’s the poor kids with the worn-out moms who get cafeteria lunch. At one point we actually forced the girls to get cafeteria lunch for a day or two because they were being snotty brats about something-maybe they didn’t like the bread I’d bought, or wouldn’t stop pestering me about wanting Lunchables instead of a sandwich. Anyway, the fifth grader actually cried about it and begged to take her lunch from home. She was embarrassed to have to get the school lunch. And because of the way lunchtime seating works with the Covid, she couldn’t sit with her friends. She had to sit with the other cafeteria lunch kids that were in line next to her.

But, yeah, food for pretty much anyone under 18 in Texas was free, starting some time around September. Seems like a pretty big waste to me. And I do think we need to find ways to feed the poor kids, but we shouldn’t waste the money for lunches that the kids like mine aren’t going to eat. Maybe the goal was to remove the stigma? Maybe the goal was to teach middle-class kids to expect handouts from the government? Whatever it was, I believe most of that food is going to waste. And they don’t even sell the leftovers to hog farmers anymore.

I sometimes wish Lenona had spent time in the military. If she had, she might understand that the best laid plans rarely survive contact with the real world.

The world is filled with impulsive people that can’t plan even five minutes ahead to save their souls.

The rest of us are in the eternal debate of the best way to pick up the pieces with the least collateral damage. It beats the heck out of nattering on about how everyone should be more responsible and far sighted when it comes to their reproductive choices.

I'm talking about my village, Ben, I believe you pay for lunch in the cafeteria unless you are poor.