Re: the requirement that the state *provide* an education

On Jul 24, 7:39 pm, "Stephanie" <h...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Banty wrote:
> > In article <QvGdnRTSDMkYSBXVnZ2dnUVZ_sbin...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Stephanie
> > says...
>
> >> Pologirl wrote:
> >>> The hard facts of life are that, if a child is sent to school
> >>> without breakfast or provision for lunch, then sending the child
> >>> home is unlikely to get them fed.
>
> >>> A better option would be to provide a school breakfast as well as a
> >>> school lunch.
>
> >>> Pologirl
>
> >> Point... WOOOOOOSSHHHHHH
>
> > Dewoo****fy please, because I also missed the point, and didnt know it
> > until now.
>
> > Batny
>
> The trend toward entitlement not being good for those who wind up
entitled
> and where it ends. (One could easily argue that how bad that is must be
> measured against the bad of being in a stinky family situation.) Also
the
> spending of resources on taking care of these issues not being good for
> everyone's education.

OK, now you've really rattled my cage. :)

Schools don't provide breakfast programs out of bleeding hearts. They
do so because it IS in the interest of all their students to do so.
School aid is tied to student performance, and research shows that a
good breakfast is linked to higher performance throughout the day
(that even afternoon performance lags after a missed breakfast, even
if lunch was super-nutritious).

Breakfast programs don't just help the ones we usually think of as
needing it -- the kids of parents who can't afford healthy food or
don't understand the relation****p between breakfast and learning. The
programs also help kids whose parents have to leave for work before
the school bus gets there, and who therefore can't make sure the kid
makes healthy choices. And they also help the kids who dawdle too long
over breakfast at home, or who have to leave in the morning before
they're actually hungry enough to eat anything (that was me). Our
suburban high school, which has relatively few kids who qualify for
free/reduced price breakfast and a lot of kids from well-off
households,  offers it for this reason.

Breakfast programs can be a real pain to implement, more so than
lunch, because kids aren't all arriving at the same time. But the
payoff appears to worth it to most administrators at schools that have
them.

Would it be better if every family had the time, money, knowledge and
desire to take care of their own kids' nutritional needs?
Unquestionably.

Is it likely to happen any time soon? Nope, especially given the
economy. Hunger is a huge problem in our area, and 37 percent of those
served by our food pantries are children. When school is out, many of
these kids don't eat breakfast or lunch unless they can get to one of
the weekday school-site summer meal programs that community groups
operate. From http://www.secondharvestwi.org/cgi-bin/site.pl?aboutFaq:
      "The people who rely on the food pantries and other charitable
agencies served by Second Harvest are making tough choices - a single
mom, choosing between paying the utilities or feeding her children; a
senior, choosing between life saving medication or buying groceries;
or a recently laid off worker, choosing between paying the mortgage
and feeding his or her family. "

Lori G.
Milwaukee, WI