I’ve never understood why we make children pay for food at school. Three out of five teachers surveyed by Share Our Strength report that they see students regularly come to school hungry because they’re not getting enough to eat at home. We’re not giving them an all-you-can-eat buffet at The Cheesecake Factory – we’re talking about child-sized portions of basic food prepared in bulk. Why even make kids pay $2 and make the school pay people to do the paperwork & collect the money? Raise everybody’s taxes by a nickel a year and feed the kids.
So this is great news for helping students learn from Boston Public Schools:
The Boston Public Schools will serve free meals – both lunch and breakfast — to all students, regardless of their income status this year. Boston becomes one of the largest cities in the nation to join a program aimed at serving healthy meals to more children and save families money.
“Every child has a right to healthy, nutritious meals in school, and when we saw a chance to offer these healthy meals at no cost to them, we jumped at the chance,” said Mayor Thomas M. Menino. “This takes the burden of proof off our low-income families and allows all children, regardless of income, to know healthy meals are waiting for them at school every day.”
Over the summer BPS and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education joined a national program, currently available in 10 states and the District of Columbia. The program, called the “Community Eligibility Option,” waives meal fees for all children regardless of income status and is also being implemented in cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago and parts of New York City.
I still remember how embarrassing it was to fill out forms at school to get a reduced rate for school lunch. Do your parents make little enough? And the nervousness of forgetting my lunch money on the first of the month, and hoping the lunch lady would give me until the next day to bring it. She ALWAYS did and NEVER gave me a hard time, but I hated the feeling of having to ask if it was OK to eat that day.
This is one tiny step towards making sure they at least don’t have to fill out a pile of paperwork before they get fed for free at school.
because if a poor person so much as uses their food stamps (EBT?) to buy a candy bar, the Republicans and the Boston Herald want to declare Marshal Law and call out the National Guard to occupy Roxbury and Mattapan until such time as they can guarantee that no one in the top 1% will have their taxes increased by so much as one red cent.
Universal programs promote social cohesion not just in the cafeteria but in the community. Means-tested programs create division and resentment and distorted incentives. Everyone benefits from government programs and it’s helpful when these very visible ones can illustrate that.
We at MassBudget have done some work in this area: 1) a recent blog post on Why Boston was Able to Offer Free Lunch to All Kids.; and 2) a research project about a year ago answering the question: Are free and reduced-price school meals getting to all the kids who need them? This second resource includes a chartpack analyzing school breakfast and lunch participation rates in Massachusetts and teases out the likely benefits of certain policy reforms, including adoption of Community Eligibility.
Never filled them out until high school when a teacher guilt tripped me into doing so, turns out my family had web eligible for reduced lunch the entire time. Definitely made high school a little easier and ended up getting me reduced rates on SAT and AP tests. Too many features of public schools (lunch, test prep, test fees, tutoring, some sports programs, transit) are privatized which is wrong. I am glad BPS did this and got national headlines for doing so. CPS could use a program like this in Chicago, but unfortunately unlike Menino, our Mayor doesn’t believe in public education.
Getting a good breakfast is arguably even more important than lunch from both a nutritional and academic angle.
“The Boston Public Schools will serve free meals – both lunch and breakfast — to all students”