hedgehog42 wrote:
> 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. :)
>
I am sorry. I really didn't mean to do that, though I recognized there was
a
risk of that when I started the thread. I just wanted conversation on the
topic. And it looks like you have given me some. So thanks!
> 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).
>
Ok. Well I would start by suggesting that the manner in which we figure
student aid, being linked to tests rather than education, is rather stupid
to begin with. So buttressing that stupidity does not a good argument
make,
in my book.
> 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.
Can't? Can't set out breakfast the day before? Can't arrange to pay for
breakfast at the cafeteria? And so are entitled to having it provide at
taxpayer expense? At the expense, perhaps, of a decent set of
manipulatives?
Or teacher education grants? Or curriculae?
I exhagerate for the sake of effect.
> 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.
>
For the record, entitlement is not only objectionable to me when it is
received by underpriviledged! Quite the opposite, in fact. But food
programs
are one teeny tiny spec in the larger issue I raised.
In our state, tax resources are shared across schools in the state. Our
town's taxes do not stay in our town, as it used to be. That makes the
economics of these kinds of programs different.
Having decided to pay for a food program to buttress test scores, do you
also then decide to provide a nap program? You saw the extremes it can go
to
in another post. But the main thing I see is generations starting to learn
that I don't have to take care of my kids because the state will do it for
me. I can get free school, free food, free trans****t, free afterschool
care.
All in the name of keeping kids in school would ... oft times don't want
to
be there!
I have this nutty vision of a place where students went because learning
was
fun and engaging. Maybe they come at 10:00 in the morning, so they have
time
in the am to do their thing. Maybe everyone is in bed by 6 to make getting
up early. I have no idea. But it seems we keep heaping programs on top of
what I see as a broken system.
> 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.
>
But since they "don't have time" let the state step in and take care of it
so that we have better test scores.
> 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:
Yep. That is a problem that needs to be solved Quite Pronto.
> "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. "
>
And programs NEED to be in place to serve these people in these tough
times,
better ones than we have in fact. But should it be linked to *schooling*
in
the long run?
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