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There is such a thing as a free lunch, at least for BPS students
By adamg on Tue, 09/03/2013 - 9:02am
Schools open tomorrow with a new policy that lets any student get a free lunch, regardless of income eligibility or whether their parents have filled out paperwork.
"Children can focus on learning when they are well-fed, and families can focus on education when they don’t have to budget for school meals every week," said BPS Interim Superintendent John McDonough. "This program makes sense for students. We expect that every major city will join this national program in the next few years - and we are able to put Boston’s families at the forefront."
Already, 78 percent of BPS students qualify for free - or reduced-price meals due to their income status. Many of those who do not qualify fall just beyond income limits. Previously, families had to fill out and return forms to qualify for the meals program. By entering into the Community Eligibility Option, BPS can waive all meal charges for all students. Parents do not need to take any action to participate. Students can continue to purchase extra food items, such as snacks, for a fee.
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Comments
78%?
Something is horribly wrong when 78% of students qualify for free lunch.
78%
It's because 78% of parents who don't qualify for free lunch won't send their kids to BPS.
The guidelines are pretty generous...
It says 78% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
For a family of three, families can make up to $36,131 and get reduced lunch. For a family of five, it's $51,005.
I mean, yes, I'm someone who's all for raising the minimum wage and increasing standards of living, but just pointing out that free/reduced-price lunch doesn't necessarily equal homeless, not working, etc.
Sure
Let's double minimum wage and everyone else's wages as well, just so social workers, EMTs, CNAs and all others currently making around $15 per hour don't quit their highly demanding jobs and become grocery baggers and burger flippers instead. To hell with that weird inflation thing, it was made up by scary evil repuglicans down south, won't happen to us in our progressive bastion of liberalism! More money to burger flippers! Take away the evil CEO's salary and give it to the workers, that $13.8M given to 1.8M employees worldwide comes out to a whopping $7.67 per year per person, enough for a large big mac combo!
Thanks
For pointing out you have a econ 101 level understanding of economics.
Please continue to spread the ignorant FUD. After all, it's only hurting your wallet as well.
Really?
Care to explain it on econ 999 level, Mr know-it-all? And to make things just a bit harder for you, keep it all econ 999, with no social justice 101 thrown in the mix.
So much anger...
such little brain.
good job
Way to make a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion! Now tell us, why exactly is a burger flipper or grocery bagger worth as much as a social worker or EMT?
Uh....
Because they're people?
Another moron successfully indoctrinated into the
demonizing of the poor. What else has Howie Carr taught you today?
Those are sad incomes.
How is anyone supposed to be able to get by making $36,131 annually? Especially a family of three?
In Boston
...
Crime does pay in this case.
It's manageable
We make less than that for our family of three. We do have the privilege though that that's with both of us working part-time and flexibly, so we're able to do things like scout out clearance sales, network with other people for bartering and hand-me-downs, spend time cooking food from scratch, etc. I do think it would be a lot harder if we were doing this by both working full-time minimum wage jobs.
so
You work enough to keep yourself under the poverty level while maintaining your Gov. handouts and "free time". You obviously are capable of joining the workforce, however have chosen not to.
Yes, pretty much
Our government handouts aren't based on income though; pretty much every child adopted from foster care gets adoption assistance.
We've chosen to reduce our work hours because time alone with parents is the best thing for a traumatized child in their first few years after adoption. I am quite capable of working full-time in the labor market and will say I was quite successful at it, thank you.
Where's this free time you're talking about though?
Handouts?
Too bad you didn't get school lunch - you might have learned to read at some point. Good thing you probably got through before MCAS - that comprehension section would have stalled your graduation.
Actually
I scored in the top 5% while stoned. Thank you!
Really?? You try to support a
Really?? You try to support a family of five on $50,000 in Boston. It was pretty hard to make ends meet on that income as a family of one!
Good Idea
When that many kids qualify, the cost of administering the fee program is much higher than just feeding the 22% who don't qualify.
Save the admin money - feed the kids. Win.
Yep
And you don't have a list or a check-in process at lunch that lets other kids know whose families make how much money.
This always boggles me; it's
This always boggles me; it's not like it's hard to conceal, for the benefit of the students. You could do what my elementary school did, ~30 years ago, for example: Have little cards that are 5- or 20-punch lunch tickets, that are paid for a bit in advance. Whether they were paid for with family money or school subsidy is invisible at the point where you hand your card in and get a hole punched in the next spot.
Exactly
That was my first reaction too. When there are that many kids on free lunch anyway, why create an entire process around it. Just give it to all of them an re-allocate the time spent on the process to other things!
Yes There is a Free Lunch
Funny the BDC fuddies are having a field day with this story, but I digress.
I actually agree with this. I don't know why we charge kids for lunch at public schools regardless. I think lunch and meals should be included. If you send your child off to a private school, a good chunk of the time, its included. So why not public schools too?
School lunch is so heavily subsidized by the USDA that I think its a disservice to charge people, and I think families are charged 'just because', when it really isn't necessary. I mean, where else can you get a complete meal with a drink for $2.25?
Providing free school lunch to everyone, not only provides nutrition for learning, but levels out the playing field. Everyone can eat for free in the cafeteria, so everyone does. No more being envious of someone else's brought in lunch, everyone eats the same thing. (This also might be helpful for kids with allergies since there would be no need for outside food to be brought in)
But of course, we can't just give something away for the good of it because it costs too much...... oh look, we just gave some poor country enough aid to feed every public school student in America for 5 years.... *eye roll*
Maybe this will help improve the graduation rate from 64.4%
The real issue that should be discussed with BPS is the graduation rate.....this isn't a third world country:(
http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/news/graduation...
Contact Information:
BPS Communications Office 617-635-9265, [email protected]
February 15, 2012
Data released by Boston Public Schools (BPS) show the district’s four-year graduation rate continues to climb to a record high. Of the students who entered high school in the 2007/2008 school year 64.4% graduated within four years. This 2011 data is an increase of 1.2 percentage points from 2010 and more than six percentage points since 2007. The data also show the district’s graduation rate is six percentage points higher as a result of credit recovery initiative.
Graduating in 4 years a meaningless metric
That's an irrelevant statistic.
The real number we want here: what percentage eventually graduate?
Four years is realistic if you started in the school system speaking English in kindergarten. Less than half of BPS students are in this group.
Four years is NOT realistic and should not be an evaluation metric when much of your school population showed up in the post-Elementary grades with little schooling from their home countries and had to take a year to learn to speak English and are still catching up.
Superimposing irrelevant suburban criteria on urban schools and screaming FAIL is utter nonsense.
Also
At the risk of beating a dead horse...
The graduation statistics and MCAS statistics count kids with severe disabilities as "not passing" and "not graduating." Boston has more students with severe disabilities than other places in the state because people whose kids have major medical issues flock to cities (from rural areas in the US and in other countries) and also because inner-city areas have higher rates of disabilities caused by poor public health (poor prenatal care, low birth weight, lead poisoning, etc.).
Envious of brought in lunch?
Really? Now everyone must eat the same things? Bringing in lunch is evil? What a lame world of conformity you believe in. I also don't believe in forcing students who would otherwise bring their own food. Whether or not the cafeteria in question is serving pizza as a vegetable, or "Mrs. Obama's Personal Kale Gourmet" the government doesn't have the right to dictate a child's diet - parents do. The more money routed through federal programs, the more hands come in to take their share and manipulate the system. If I'd rather make my child lunch, I should be free from being forced into the program due to otherwise paying for something someone may or may not require.
Maybe the argument can be made to provide free* lunch to everyone, but this is really a stretch. Ultimately things also come down to the fact that there is a budget, and it's not a bad thing when people able to pay for their lunch do so and no reason to pay extra for things people may not want.
There's also something to be said about it being good for students to prepare for the fact that they will have to pay their way. I'd rather students be given some kind of credits to use so
1) they're used to some kind of transaction for things like sustaining themselves - they'll have to work to survive
2) it gives them the ability to make choices - what do I want to eat today? I could get one slice of pizza vs a chicken sandwich and snack etc.
Both valuable life skills to have.
Spend money on safety nets for those who need it, don't force everyone else on them.
Relax, nobody is forcing your child to eat anything
At least not in BPSville.
Go ahead, send him or her to school with Fluffernutters topped with pepperoni and Doritos every day for the entire school year. Don't forget that liter bottle of Coke.
Heck, at least at my daughter's school, they even sell pizza every single day, should your kid forget that slice of meat-lover's special you so lovingly packed.
This all-free-lunch policy is an attempt to help out kids who really need it. Speaking from personal experience, it will also help out kids whose parents did make them lunch, but they forgot them at home or left them on the bus, so they don't have to borrow 50 cents from a friend to get a bag of chips or a cookie (both of which are also for sale at her school).
Hey Adam did you ever attend BPS!
No you didn't. You should ask your kids to bring home some brown ketchup and a hot dog that LITERALLY will bounce off the floor when dropped. However my favorite was pizza in a plastic bag. You could never get the thing out with the cheese still on it. NEVER!
No, I never attended BPS
And I never had a lunch period in my NYC school because it was when the city was going bankrupt and we had triple sessions and mine always started just after the lunch periods or just before them (and, of course, we had to walk uphill in the snow both ways just to get there, but WE LIKED IT).
However, I have a daughter in a BPS school, and I asked her this morning how the pizza (served from a counter under a large sign that proclaims: "Any other slice is just a sliver!") was and she said "fine." She doesn't like hot dogs, so I don't know about their bounceability. She's a bagel fiend and finds the morning bagels they serve edible enough.
Only thing relevant is the lunches served in 2013
I didn't go to a BPS school, but I have three kids in the system, and have several years worth of looking at the menus. I can't recall hot dog ever being listed. Two of my kids generally like the school lunch, one doesn't. The one who doesn't is a very picky eater, the other two are on their way to being foodies. The lunches are fine, and fairly healthy.
Nowhere does it say you must have the lunch provided
Or that there are no options being offered. I did read that there will still be "extra" items for purchase.
My elementary school offered free lunch to everyone when I was a kid, and plenty of kids still brought in their own. It was nice to have on those days when I forgot lunch though.
Obesity Issue
Thinking back to my memory of school lunches was it "looked" okay and I seem to enjoy just about anything. But remembering the studies over the years between school lunch and obesity, I have to ask the quality of BPS's food.
I remember two years ago UHub had a post about people worrying that it was being fed expired food. Of course, the food was not expired, but it still pointed out it was frozen food. To my knowledge, even if it was not expired, most frozen food are not known to be very nutritious.
Here's a thought, if it is costing more to administrate than to give food, what if it is reflecting more of the cost of the food than the cost of administration?
One irony of centralizing where to eat, if the source is bad, now's everyone is going to be affected rather making everyone healthier.
Michelle Obama is way ahead of you
She has spearheaded programs to remove the junk food from school lunches. Eating healthy food never made anybody obese. Skipping lunch is a very bad idea.
Obesity is also linked to food insecurity - if people have regular access to good food, they don't overeat high calorie food when available and then not eat when the money is low. That's a sure way to pack on pounds and become unhealthy.
Yet most of the schools which
Yet most of the schools which followed her guidelines have since reversed that policy out of student complaints. You can give kids a free healthy lunch. Doesn't mean that they will eat it or be satiated enough to be content.
If Boston or the food my
If Boston or the food my school was serving is still being served. Then I think your counter-point is moot. We are still offering "Free-for-all" food that are not very healthy in calories or nutrition.
Also I suspect her approach is still misconceived. Remember the food pyramid? She may have replaced it, but it still seems she operates roughly long the same mindset of being hostile to meats and fat while too open to all types of sugary food. And the latest turn seem to be finding that we have been overemphaziing on fats while underestimating sugars - lolipops aside - because sugars also come from food like bread and fruits too.
For example, she is replacing soda with fruit juice. Fruit juice is better than soda, I still can recommend it (if you want orange, eat an orange - not just drink its juice). But we're still not recognizing enough with sugar to view that fruit juice is not that much better than soda.
Overall, her program is emphasizing a lot of calories with offerings of fruits and vegatables. But I don't think she recognizes enough on the importance of protein (from meat and legumes while is also still seem to be hesitated by our reluctance by fats) and dangers of sugars (like seeing fruit juice as good just because it's fruit - and I'm not sure what's her definition of juice, if the program is accepting Welch's as acceptable fruit juice with its HFCS, then that's whole 'nother layer to this problem).
Obsession with Protein
That's so 1950s.
The reality is that protein requirements are not what most people raised in weird times think they are.
Check out Walt Willett's work - and how he got booted from the food pyramid committee for demanding that science be more important than the milk lobby.
The cereal lobby is just as bad with all those carbs....
Don't you think?
Plenty of protein supporters are anti-dairy as well now too but I do agree the milk lobby is pretty strong.
Walt Willett
I'm aware of Walt Willett's fight for science for the food pyramid. Though maybe not as strongly as you going by the conviction of your recommendation. And I am not aware that implies from you meaning of 1950's protein thinking.
Also the 1950's did not had an obesity problem. While the food pyramid demonizing fats (and thus indirectly protein includes sources of both nuts and meat) while emphasizing carbohydrates (and research is finding more than not that sugar may be our real enemy for obesity than fat) was taught in the recent two decades. Also, it's fallacious to assume anything old is bad too.
As for Willett, my understanding of his advocacy does include protein and definitely more than the food pyramid thinking of the past 20-ish years. He definitely in concurrence with the carbohydrate issue. I'm not sure red meat that he eschews in his advocacy. The studies are still going back and forth. One recent study is noting processed red meat could be the real reason to the bad name than red meat itself (it's not the steak, but the sausage). But that said, there's still poultry, fish, and nuts.
Do you think Queen Obama
Would eat a BPS meal?
Google Images is your friend
She's been eating a whole lot of school lunches, from the looks of it.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/healthcare/new-scho...
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Consumer-Corner/2...
Oh, and to the person who says "schools have given up", above? Be aware that Newsmax is not a factual news source. The USDA says that very few schools have actually quit the program due to the guidelines, although some school board types have grandstanded on threatening to in places like Kentucky and Tennessee.
I see her in front of a
School lunch, but not consuming one. Nice Try!
As opposed to "Dime bag Laura"?
I think she was the only First Lady I knew of who actually killed a man.
Getting your info crossed
It was actually Glenn Beck that Raped And Murder A Young Girl In 1990.
"In May 2000, a two-page
"In May 2000, a two-page police report pertaining to a fatal accident that had taken place near Midland, Texas, in 1963 was made public. It contained the information that 17-year-old Laura Welch had run a stop sign, causing the death of the sole occupant of the vehicle hers had struck. According to that report, the future First Lady had been driving her Chevrolet sedan on a clear night shortly after 8 p.m. on 6 November 1963 when she entered an intersection without heeding the stop sign and there collided with the Corvair sedan driven by 17-year-old Michael Douglas. Also in the car with Laura Welch was a passenger, 17-year-old Judy Dykes. "
Snopes.com
OK, folks
Can we get back to discussing school lunches now?
But...
doesn't someone need to mention Chappaquidick first?
Frozen food
can be perfectly nutritious. Freezing is the most effective way to preserve the nutrient content of food. Frozen vegetables, for example, usually have the highest nutrient content of any vegetables for sale in a supermarket, higher even than fresh, because they're frozen almost immediately after picking, which preserves most nutrients, while fresh vegetables are often days from the field and their nutrients have declined in the interim. The only way to get more nutritious vegetables than frozen is to grow them yourself or get them straight from the farm, like at a farmers' market.
They can be nutritious
They can be nutritious, but most frozen are the TV dinner kind. If BPS is still using frozen food for school lunch. Are they the TV dinner kind? Or the flash frozen just-picked vegetables?
But the same could be said
But the same could be said about food that sits on a shelf, or in the refrigerator.
The FDA has found there is no
The FDA has found there is no difference in nutrition between fresh produce and frozen produce. In fact, fresh is picked before its peak of ripeness and loses vitamins every day it has been off the vine.
http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/nutrition/h...
Again
Again, as I responded to the anon above. I don't believe fitday is talking about the TV-dinner type of frozen food. I'm talking about that kind with all the preservative-chemical engineering for the boxed food. And I suspect BPS frozen food is more of the tv-dinner type than the Fitday.com just-picked frozen food.
Frozen food
The real issue with the frozen expired food is that the BPS shouldn't be buying so much food so far in advance that they have to pay to store it in a freezer long enough for it to expire.
Drastically reduced prices
FDA/USDA/Gov rates means its probably cheaper to just take the surplus and store it / let it expire; than to try to grab it when needed or have to go out onto the open market.
Most things they don't get from USDA don't tend to go bad quickly anyways.
So are the children starving
So are the children starving or are they obese? Can the city make up its mind?
Malnutrition
Obesity is a form of malnutrition. Healthy meals fight malnutrition.
You can take a multivitamin
You can take a multivitamin and go easy on the processed carbs and sugars to avoid being malnourished.
If you are sticking to a very
If you are sticking to a very tight food budget, processed carbs are cheap and have a long shelf life. They are much easier to find then unprocessed fruits and veggies. And if you have to take two buses to get to full-service grocery stores, how fresh do you think that milk & veggies are when you get home? Or how heavy are the cans if you go that way? Forget about frozen veggies in the summer. And if you are working two jobs, do you have the time to shop around OR take two buses to get supplies?
How can obesity, malnutrition/over-nutrition, and poverty possibly be related?
1) Education and knowledge of nutrition. If a school has "home ec" or nutrition classes, they start at higher grades. If you don't make it that far, and Boston has a high drop rate, you might not learn to cook or make good choices. (If a kid's parent is working two jobs, they are probably reheating food or making quick meals so they are not learning that at home.)
2) Access to affordable food supermarkets. Where are the supermarkets in Boston? Most grocery stores available to poorer residents in these regions carry few perishables. (PriceRite in Hyde Park or Save-a-Lot in Roslindale & Roxury being an exception.)
Thanks goodness that are more Farmer's Markets in the neighborhoods but not many have hours that working folks can get to unless they cart it home on the bus.
The supermarkets closed in
The supermarkets closed in most of the rough neighborhoods because they are low profit margin businesses which can't survive in areas with high rates of theft. These neighborhoods typically have an abundance of small markets which do carry staple goods and are able to overcome the profit margin problem through their smaller selection of staple goods.
Regarding obesity-one has to bear in mind, however,
that one big reason(s) that there's more obesity among kids nowadays than in the past is that lots of kids these days are busy at their desks playing video games on their computers, smart-phones, etc., instead of running around and playing outdoors, as they used to prior to the arrival of the computers, internet, video games, etc.
It's okay to stress nutritious food, but here's another contributing factor, as well; After-school sports programs, as well as Phys. Ed., etc., have been pared down considerably, if not whittled to the bone, and that's not doing kids any good, either.
I still remember playing outside, running around, riding my bike, and playing all kinds of games such as hide-and-seek, etc., hula hoop, jumprope, Chinese jumprope, etc. with the other kids in the neighborhood, as well as in school, during recess, as a preteen, and then, although I wasn't on any athletic teams in high school, riding my bike to and from school, including our high school, which was (and still is) located in a different town from the one that my siblings and I grew up in.
I remember seeing kids eat quite a bit when I was growing up going to school. They ate all kinds of foods, and obesity was very rare back then, back in the 1950's and the 1960's, at least where I went to school.
Thanks Miki
:)
What's with the sarcasm? Is that necessary?
$2.25 a day
I never understood this either so at $2.25 a day I sent my kids with lunch everyday it pretty much averaged out plus I didn't have to worry about whether they actually ate it.
Hey...I remember when school lunches were a mere quarter a day,
back in the mid to late 1960's, where I went to high school. Most of the kids, including myself, ate the school lunches every day, without becoming obese, or even overweight.
The school lunches may not have been Mama's home cooking, but they were okay...nutritious, and filling.
I grew up poor
and even I think this is ridiculous. 78%!!!? All policies like this do is add to a sense of entitlement. Many of these kids already come from families where they already get subsidized food [food stamps], very low cost/free healthcare [masshealth/medicaid], heavily subsidized housing, free education, heavily subsidized public transportation [including reduced fares on weekdays during school hours], and a multitude of other 'entitlements'. Maybe this is one of the ways many of them can afford nice smartphones, expensive clothes, bling, $300. Dre headphones, etc.,
You forgot the part about the Cadillacs
We know they all ride around in Cadillacs. St. Ronny himself told us so.
How the hell do you know the people you see with expensive clothing and Dr. Dre headphones are on welfare/Medicaid/etc.? Your comments don't strike me as coming from somebody who actually would talk to people (i.e., black and brown people) with such things to find out.
Your comment about "heavily subsidized public transportation" indicates you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
And how dare these moochers go to free schools! Damn them, there are perfectly good private schools they should be paying for with all the money the government is giving them!
Yeah, God forbid, right?
God forbid everyone in the most prosperous nation that the world has ever known think they should be "entitled" to something like $2 worth of food in their kid's mouth every day.
God forbid they might afford to blow some cash on a frivolity since they aren't capable of taking a family vacation together or anything else that might cost more than a few hundred dollars that everyone else uses to feel good about living.
God forbid they feel like they are entitled to the least we can provide them to offset all of the ways we have failed as a society to give everyone, and primarily them, a fair chance to succeed.
Fair Chance
I find the list he created as kinda has a point. While the $2 worth of food is a strong appeal to sense of kindness at low cost, why should money be given to allow a person to be able to afford to blow some cash on frivolity?
And the list he made - mistakes aside - has a point. One can get food stamps with subsidized housing and insurance and that covers for a lot of daily life. The last paragraph justify that we failed as a society to give everyone a fair chance, but if failure means getting rent, heath, and food subsidized while success (moderate level) means paying by yourself - that does not seem fair.
The rebuttals I can think is how many are getting that level of aid and how much it is actually costing.
BTW, this doesn't necessarily means the poor are getting too much and making the middle the worst aspects of higher income with none of the pleasures. My understanding for the Boston area is many are obviously working (though writing this sentence reminds me of the Eeka comment), that it may mean the real problem is working is just not providing enough income (I guess this does remind me of that anon rebuttaling comment of the well-paid factory worker economy where HS level knowledge and education is enough to get same what entry-level bachelor degree jobs offers while HS means minimum wage and thus needing assistance in multiple aspects). Also, I think health care should just be single payer.
Something you may not know
The school lunch program was initiated after WWII as a matter of national security.
Poor physical condition resulting from childhood nutritional issues had a negative impact on the number of draftees available for military service.
http://www.schoolnutrition.org/Content.aspx?id=1872
There were similar problems noted in WWI, but we were not in that conflict for as long.
These were the children of the grand era of "don't mess with business" and "the poor are just lazy". Been there, done that.
One could argue that health care and other supports that even many developing countries provide in some measure to their people are matters of "national security" for similar reasons.