There are some states that feed kids as a matter of routine state budgeting. Those kids get a lunch paid for by taxpayers. A damn fine investment of tax dollars, if you ask me.
Here we parents have to pay. But parents that cannot afford it can contact the authorities and get government funds for that without their children (and their friends) to ever learn about that.
Schools provide lunch to ANYONE who shows up needing lunch in my county.
Year round.
Adults can come, they can bring children not old enough to go to school and they can come alone.
They don’t sit in the cafeteria with the kids during the school year BUT they can pick up a free lunch from the kitchen.
Turns out feeding people costs less than hungry people (which is how they keep justifying it to the people who want to take it away) AND it’s the right thing to do.
It’s only the right thing to do if your interests do not include oppressing voters and hoarding wealth.
My uncle: “AIN’T NO BROWN KID EVER GONNA EAT ON MY DIME DODGAMMIT!”
He and all his friends are voting, you should too.
Tim Walz is governor of one of these states.
I agree feeding children is an unequivocally great use of tax dollars.
I pay thousands per year in school taxes and the vast majority goes to school administrators making 6 figures. We can’t just toss more money at schools to fix this - we need legislation stating how the money is used. The money needs to go to the kids and teachers instead of clueless rich people.
Vote in your local elections, join the PTA, tell your friends how fucked it is and ask them to vote. You can’t legislate yourself out of this as school boards regularly mismanage funds for decades.
Dude, read the room. We are in the era of the oligarch.
MOST money will go to the clueless rich who do not need it and we will continue to slide into french revolution levels of wealth gap.
That’s what happend at my highschool. There was a year we couldn’t even afford paper but we were a school of over 2000 kids. Not a wealthy area by any means, but with all those taxes from all those families you’d think basic supplies wouldn’t be an issue.
It wouldn’t have been an issue if one of the administrators wasn’t fucking stealing money from us… I don’t even mean they had too high of a salary, I mean they were literally stealing money…
I obviously can’t speak for everyone, but this never happened when I was in middle school and high school in the 90s. If someone couldn’t afford the school lunch they had a free lunch program where kids would just go up to the counter and get a sandwich and a juice. No one ever said anything to the kids who got the free lunch because it’s lunch lol everyone’s gotta eat!
Making someone wear a wristband because they couldn’t afford lunch just seems needlessly cruel
Tbf, cruelty isn’t the point. For the recipients of the most benefits of conservatives being in charge, things like lower taxes and free handouts to corporations etc. is the point. And to Russia and China, the point of the disinformation warfare is to distract while invading others countries. And to the voters themselves, they get to live in a fantasy dreamland where “God is in charge” (ignoring all those pesky parts of the Bible that say e.g. take care of widows & orphans, the worker deserves their wages, you reap what you sow, etc.).
All the school shootings, all the lunch shamings, all of it, and it’s all a by-product of those real goals. Children’s actual lives, health , and mental health do not seem to matter in the slightest according to those precepts. 😭
Yeah the wristband is some bullshit. When I was a kid and on the free lunch for poor kids program, all they needed was a fucking list at the checkout. I took my lunch tray to the checkout lunch-lady and said my name, and she’d check it on the list and we were done.
A “Scarlet P” as it were isn’t defensible, but a name-only system seems ripe for abuse. Unless the employee can keep track of every student, all it takes is a greedy and/or cruel student to use someone else’s name and they don’t get a lunch that day.
Best method, imo, is free lunch for every student. No fuss, no muss. That children are held responsible for the economic welfare of their family (and there are people fighting to keep it that way) is atrocious. Just feed the children, easy as.
No. Not even close to OK. There are examples of light in the darkness, such as Tim Walz (Kamala Harris’ running mate) who as the governor of Minnesota enacted a law to make school lunches free for all. Kids don’t get to decide who they are born to, and hungry kids don’t learn nearly as well as fed kids. Educated kids help our future, so it’s an extremely high ROI.
Americans getting pissed off at Europeans constantly making fun of them… And yet I’m still learning more ridiculous bullshit about that country.
Jesus christ, what a sad joke.
We get pissed off because we don’t have socialized medicine for those burns.
But you don’t understand, we have happy billionaires! That’s all that really matters in life. Children can fuck off, billionaires is where it’s at.
The average quality of life is quite high! Hmm didn’t Twain say something about this situation…
Are they though?
No, sadly they actually aren’t happy. There’s still money out there that isn’t in their bank account. It drives them insane knowing “their” money is still in someone else’s bank account.
It drives billionaires insane know that they are losing at the imaginary numbers game.
John Oliver just did this one
Yeah haha, that’s where I learned it from
The elementary school I taught at offered free lunches to all students. Still, parents who packed food for their kids would give them Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Takis and a huge can of Arizona Ice Tea daily. These students looked down on hot lunch kids. I remember seeing a student that had a lunchable everyday, but clearly their parent got it from a 7/11 or something because there was a price tag on it and it was for $5. There were also parents that dropped of fast food EVERY SINGLE DAY to their student. These were low income families too.
When lunch food is a status symbol, the system has failed you.
Wait wait wait, waaaaaaait a fucking minute, this is done by the school itself, as in the bloody adults running the goddamn thing?
Holy hell
It’s disgusting. When my son was very young, my wife and I struggled to make ends meet, and got behind on his school lunch payments (I still can’t believe that’s even a thing). The lunch lady at his school would lecture him about how much we owed, and how he shouldn’t get to eat for free just because we were lazy or whatever. He’d come home thinking he was in trouble. America hates poor people.
Nope! Lol
So you watched John Oliver last night?
The part with the teacher who was tasked with telling all of the students that free lunches are over… Jesus Christ. She could see the worried faces and darting eyes of the kids who were depending on those meals.
Link plz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UCqtnr-pF8
Full Episode on the official channel. But it’s geoblocked in locations where it’s officially availible on paid sources. But you can watch it from France or the Czech Republic (just some examples I know of) with a VPN.
The main segment will be on the official channel (without geoblock) on thursday (I think).
No spoilers! I want to be surprised by the messed up topic
We are so not okay.
No we’re not OK
I remember in grade school my district had a system where everyone who bought anything at the cafeteria went through an internal “type in your ID to the pin pad” system. Internally, the computer would decide whether the student was charged against their account or if it did a discount/free.
When has America ever been okay? It went from land of the free while enslaving people and restricting voting ability, to then freeing slaves but continuing to oppress entire groups to minimize their allowable impact on society, until they it became oppress people financially every way possible.
You skipped the genocide.
Also, slavery never ended in the US. It was only barred for people who haven’t been convicted of a crime
Sure. Also forced sterilization. Using groups for experimentation without consent. Stealing land. Bombing entire islands so native people can no longer live there. On and on.
And share cropping has been made systematic by depressing wages so far people can’t afford to move, change jobs, train, etc…
As a Canadian, I’m like:
You guys are getting food?
(School cafeterias with food service beyond selling terrible premade sandwiches for people who forgot their lunch are rare below college level and AFAIK what few exist all operate like a fast-food restaurant, where everyone pays for their meal then and there.)
In Russia, certain groups of kids (children of low-income parents, of families with 3+ kids, orphans) receive a special ticket, one per day, allowing them to have a school lunch for free.
Sometimes they share unused ones (tickets don’t have names on them), which practically guarantees there’s a bunch of kids on their side - everyone wants free lunch.
And generally it was more of a thing to flash, not something to be shamed for.
Red states are not okay, because all they have left in their value system is cruelty toward people they see as not “pulling their weight,” as if we still live in some resource-scarce era of yore where if you don’t work, you don’t eat (and even if you do work, eating is not guaranteed, better work harder!).
Blue states are increasingly providing lunches, and sometimes even breakfast, for all students free of charge. It used to be income-based (you’d get free or half-priced lunch based on your family’s income), but even that system is getting ditched because of the associated stigma and the problem of some needy students falling between the cracks.
I taught last year in a district near Dallas, TX where 70% of students were on a free or reduced lunch plan. This year, I am teaching in a district near Portland, OR where breakfast and lunch is free for every student, as it should be.
Minnesota and governor Tim Walz for the win.
Minnesota is probably the most famous example at the moment, but they’re far from alone!
https://www.nycfoodpolicy.org/states-with-universal-free-school-meals-so-far-update/
I’m so sad that Kamala stole our governor. He’s going to be really good for the country as a whole, but he was ours!
Do you think you will elect another Democrat?
don’t forget the red state genius idea of “why pay janitors when we can make the kids clean up each others’ puke? then they’ll think it’s great when they start getting paid $7/hr for manual labor at 14”
