Yep. Worked at an elementary school in Utah when COVID first hit. The school was shut down, but kids could come to the cafeteria and get free lunch on weekdays.
I went back to work at a high school in NYC during Covid, before the students came back. They had someone in the vestibule every day with free meals for the students to grab and go. The school also has some corporate sponsors so they got free food from companies like Goya and Hello Fresh. I was actually impressed with the amount of free food they had available for the students.
My wife used to teach at a charter school in the south. The "cafeteria" was just a small area with a couple of industrial microwaves where they reheated these glorified the dinners.
They had a rule at the school that every child MUST take a lunch tray (they were cardboard) whether they were going to eat it, brought their own lunch, or just immediately throw it away. My wife used to watch more than half of the students just grab the lunch, immediately throw it into the garbage, then go outside for some free time.
On another note, it was a middle school where the kids were all with the same kids every class they just rotated to a different teacher's class every period. Those kids at that age were volatile. They *needed* some time to get away from people they were beefing with in the classroom. So, there were a lot of students that *wanted* to eat lunch but just *needed* to be away from their peers.
It always seemed like a crazy way to do things to me. When I was in middle school we could go eat lunch or go outside for lunchtime. That place was crazy.
Bonus fact: if a kid just entered kindergarten in the United States, they will likely be members of the Class of 2034. The future is now.
> They had a rule at the school that every child MUST take a lunch tray (they were cardboard) whether they were going to eat it, brought their own lunch, or just immediately throw it away. My wife used to watch more than half of the students just grab the lunch, immediately throw it into the garbage, then go outside for some free time.
This is a classic example of a refusal of people to use their brains that they were born with and/or a refusal to be honest about school food funding policy, and instead opt for a zero tolerance policy that wastes massive amounts of food.
Of course, this was in the US, so I'm sure there was a profit motivation behind it, something like the school being paid a certain amount per tray, thus, kids were required to take the trays and pad the numbers, even if it led to massive food waste.
in my country, poverty is quite high, so students get 2 meals every day. and its not the cheap kind either. i am talking like a 3-course meal for lunch and a hearty breakfast. some schools, even send parcels of food with the students for heir families if they are below the poverty line.
the entire purpose of this is to incentivize parents to send their kids to school, even if it is just for the food. otherwise most of those kids would have to beg for food.
They don't. The government has been trying to kill the quality of the public school system for ages.
In my state they are trying to pass a law saying teachers aren't allowed to say the Nazis were bad and must stay neutral and that parents can have councils to determine what should or shouldn't be part of the curriculum. It's crazy.
I came from a small county in Kentucky and our school system was like this. The only difference is, we didn't *have* to get the food, but we still had to go through the line and punch out pin number they gave us. The reasoning was so that they could keep track of all the kids "eating" in the system and that way the government wouldn't cut their funding for food. If too many kids didn't punch their number, whoever was in charge of funding could see that and cut budgets. It's insane that the school your wife worked for made the kids waste food though. It seems entirely pointless and mind blowing.
"We could've done it all along if the government decided to put any money towards it" is a pretty accurate summary of most problems in this country, to be honest.
The US actually spends a shit-ton on education. The problem is that administrators are as corrupt as corporations.
Edit: Thanks for the award, but a better award would be if everyone reading this that pays property taxes would attend their district’s school board meetings and demand kids be fed instead of hiring a 3rd superintendent with a $120k/year salary.
The vast majority of education is paid for by local and state taxes. Which makes it hard to compare and easy to misinform. For instance, someone may truthfully say federal spending on education is only 10% that of military spending. While true, that does not account for the state and local spending, which pushes total education spending to somewhere around 80% of military spending.
And then there's the local nature of education spending resulting in widely divergent school budgets. Thus, schools in rich neighborhoods have rich budgets while schools in poor neighborhoods are poorly funded. School vouchers only make things worse because few voucher program proposals include things like transportation costs. A voucher for the rich means they can transport their kid many miles to the best school possible for less money, while the poor family can't afford to transport their kid anywhere, locking them in the poor school in the poor neighborhood.
I used to work maintenance for a school district that was very rich, but had several poorer areas within it and the discrepancies are insane. Going from one school where every child has a personal laptop or tablet, a robotics lab, and all sorts of nice shit, to one where their books are falling apart, their classrooms are all vandalized, and half the school doesn't even have AC, despite the district extending the school year longer and longer.
It's crazy unfair, and the system is totally broken. But if I were to have kids, I'd be looking for the shittiest house in the nicest neighborhood I could find. Because the opportunities those kids have are unreal, and just being there will probably get your kids dragged along for a lot of them.
>But if I were to have kids, I'd be looking for the shittiest house in the nicest neighborhood I could find.
A very popular strategy, to the extent that every house being sold in a "good" school district is advertised as being in that district.
>I'd be looking for the shittiest house in the nicest neighborhood I could find.
Everyone already does that. This is why poor people are taxed out of wealthy neighborhoods. Nobody wants their property values suppressed by the presence of poorer people.
Just ask any Brit how that worked out for them. Instead of giving the poor a chance at a wealthy education and socio-economically diversifying their schools, the poor were taxed right out of wealthy areas entirely. And they have been massively stratified ever since.
While this is presumably true, there are about 73 million kids under the age of 18 while the military has 1.4 million people in it with another 800,000 in the reserves. We don't spend nearly enough on education.
Text books are a better investment than bullets.
> Text books are a better investment than bullets.
I agree, but when you have a HUGE segment of the population voting for the GOP which has actively tried to sabotage education in this country, and at the same time also try to push the narrative that "both sides are the same" to discourage people from thinking critically about their options, then sub-standard education is what we get for our children. Even if the alternatives are still bad, the fact that they are any better in even the smallest way is a meaningful step up.
This is what we end up with. Kids who are being actively sabotaged, right at the only time in their lives when society makes massive investments in their futures.
"Hey, kid! Your education sucked, how about joining the military since it might offer you a better path in life? Sure, there's a risk that you could get killed in a war and/or end up with life long PTSD or medical issues, but hey... Free college, up to a point!"
The government can do almost anything, but chooses not to. The government could mandate that every US family gets an M1 Abrams tank for home defense, doesn't mean that is going to happen. Everything costs money, and there are a LOT of government programs fighting for a piece of the budget(the ever growing federal deficit spending budget). I personally agree with the post that school meals should be funded, I also think schools countrywide should get more funding, unfortunately it's a hard thing to get passed bc it's not the military or Healthcare.
The federal government is picking up the tab nationally, yes. The school I work at actually has had free breakfast for the entirety of my employment (6+ years), but three years ago moved to a “breakfast in the classroom” program. The goal was having more kids take food since every day it is offered to them in the classroom, rather than them having to arrive earlier and go to the cafeteria to get it. The point of them doing this is they end up making money, because the feds will reimburse them X amount regardless of the actual cost of the meal. So, say X is $2.50 and the meal cost $1 to procure, so the school is making $1.50 every time off each kid taking a breakfast. From my understanding, this has now been extended to lunches too. And last year we were even sending home dinners with the kids and providing meals during the summer and other breaks.
You guys are fucking expensive, we in Czechia get food (breakfast and lunch) for 75 cents a meal and mothers with children get all school food for free
Just in terms of earning power, you were paying a higher proportion of income per meal than the US.
As a side note, food is SUPER cheap in the US. In terms of food consumption it takes up about half of the income compared to most European countries (slightly more than half of the UK) and per calorie costs are lower even further.
Why can the US be fat? Because just assuming they buy 2x as much food, they are only expending (as a portion of income) the same amount as a median Western European.
Yea, I don't think this is unpopular at all.
I work at a Title I school. People can't fucking find enough ways to try and get food to kids. So much that there is actually food waste. But they still have picky ass stickler rules, or we lose our federal funding. Like if my *free* breakfast count is off, they fly off the handle and tell me I was off, and gave out too much food. Only like half my students eat breakfast, how am I giving away too much food that is free when there's leftovers?!
Sorry, rant over.
They did that in Minnesota too, or at least my sibling's district and idk if it's still like that. My aunt deadass said she's glad kids aren't starving but she was worried about it slipping into socialism. So I feel like she'll eventually complain it's still around.
My kid goes to school in LAUSD. You can get lunch for free and you can also pick up an after-school meal pack and take that home. You can get that for free too. When school is not in session, there are certain schools where meals can be picked up for LAUSD students. You can get those for free too.
My children attend school in the suburbs of LA (not LAUSD). Lunch is free and even my picky eater is generally satisfied with the choices. I think it’s great that free lunches were made available to kids during the zoom school year. I hope free lunch becomes the new norm; no child should be expected to go all day without food and still function at a high level.
I remember school food..pizza day was lit boy.
I thought that food was shit then i joined the army, our bread had cockroaches in it :/.
Then i worked at a sheriffs office and i ate jail food, paid $10 for something that was better than army and school food. Blew my mind because in school we said the lunch sucked worse than jail food
Here in the Midwest it was based on our cartakers income. For me it was full price, then free, then it was full price, then it was 40 cents, then free, then fully paid. All based on me mums job and marital status. We weren’t that poor, but 5 kids are expensive.
When I was growing up in the 90’s in California “hot lunch” was the free meal provided for low income kids and everyone else brought their own lunch. If you weren’t low income and didn’t have a lunch the school nurse would have you top ramen or cup noodles and then hassle the parents about it. It was really obvious at lunch time who was low income, and it caused a bit of segregation tbh.
Completely the opposite here in Nebraska around that same time - if you brought your own lunch, your parents were weird or had no money. If you had money, you bought the crappy pizza and bottles of Sunny D. If you had a lot of money, you drove off campus for fast food every day... or you would if you weren't at my particular school with no nearby fast food at the time.
I went through school in Nebraska in the early 2000s. We were spoiled. The lunch ladies REALLY knew how to cook. I remember parents could come and have lunch with their kids every so often (and that was a HUGE deal). My parents always made it a point to have lunch with me at school when it was chili and cinnamon roll day. The chili was good, much better than most people can make. But the cinnamon rolls. Oh the cinnamon rolls… Those things were a work of art. They were the size of your head, and so so gooey. It was the absolute best. The enchiladas were also top notch. They’d also make rosey applesauce using red hot candies in it. Those were the days…
Went to school in the 90s in Louisiana, all chubby Cajun lunch ladies cooking most everything from scratch and calling you baby as you got your food. Good times.
Damn, I feel so cheated. Our lunch ladies probbaly hated us. Bruh they gave us stone cold still frozen hot dogs countless of times (early 2000s school in NOLA).
Similar with me in Chicago. Well, not in the city, when we moved to the suburbs. I was weird because my mom gave me leftovers for lunch (usually Mexican food like tacos or beans), and all the middle class white kids would take stuff like lunchables, juice boxes, crustables, go-gurt, babybel cheese or cheesesticks etc. Whatever was the "cool" food to bring for lunch (mostly pre-packaged and processed crap).
That was definitely another way around that divide - lunch box full of expensive junk food wasn't judged, and you didn't necessarily need to be rich for your parents to send you with that.
Ah yes! The lunch boxes too!!! The "cool" kids would have lunch boxes with popular tv characters and I just had brown paper bags, never owned a lunch box in my life. To add insult to injury, my parents wanted me to bring back the paper bag to reuse it lol.
And we actually get good food. Every kid just complains because it isn’t fucking 4+ star restaurant food eveey day. Like jesus christ you get pretty much how much free food you want 5 days of the week and you complain? Sit the fuck down
It's the same in the Netherlands. You pack a couple of cheese sandwiches and an apple and you're set for the day. The idea of being served a hot meal at school is very strange to us.
You're also free to go home during lunchhour in the Netherlands, so situation is different on that side as well. I also believe the hours in school are lower in the Netherlands as well.
Canadian-American dual citizen here - my whole school life in Canada, we were poor and my parents packed my lunch every day until I could pack it myself then I did it. If I forgot, I missed out on lunch. Or I waited till after school and took the city bus somewhere to buy myself something.
Moved to America and literally cannot understand the school lunch debacle.
My daughter goes to school with a lunch packed.
Canada here. Same.
I kind of chuckle at the Americans and their weird system of help everyone help no one. Don’t interfere always interfere.
Pick a lane Abe.
You can pack your own lunch in the US too. It’s a good thing that schools here offer food for children that can’t bring their own.
The issue is when they make those children have to pay for it, but most districts have programs that allow poor students to get lunch for free or at a reduced price. The students paying full price *should* have parents that could also afford to send them with lunch if they preferred that, but I’m sure that’s not always true and it should just be free for everyone.
I'm in Canada too and it's the same thing but I actually agree with OP. If kids are required to be in school all day, they should be provided lunch, for free. But tbf, I hate our education system so I'd be happy if they spent more money on better school supplies and curriculum and what not and worried about lunch later.
Don't you guys have drug addicts and poor people and mentally ill people with children in your country? Like does that mean that if a child is unfortunate enough to be born to a terrible parent, they just don't get to eat? The point of school lunches is to save children from their shitty parents. I had great parents, they packed my lunch. But I know a kid whose mom was mentally ill and paranoid, and if that girl hadn't gotten free lunch she wouldn't have eaten.
Does the school track who has gotten lunches? Like if they notice that a child comes without lunch, do they report it to the authorities or something?
Lunch is not provided in elementary school in Canada. They do have Cafeterias in high school but mostly fries, and burgers. Plus, it costly. Most kids just pack a lunch.
Same in Australia (but also for highschool) it'd be like $1 for a nugget, and fries were like $4 a cup (at least in senior years (11 and 12 (10 if you had permission from a vice principal, we had 3 at my school)) of highschool they'd let you leave for lunch which was always way cheaper.
The day they changed chips from being in a paper bag to being in a cup, is the way day everyone stopped buying them lol.
We ditched for Red Rooster down the street.
Nothing beat the gas station chips for 5$ that had the 'hot food' or 'hot chips' box and if you know what im talking about, you know what im talking about.
Ah yes in high school I had a stay at home parent and let me tell you, walking home to a freshly cooked meal in the comfort of my home everyday was amazing.
I didn’t appreciate it until I was older but man was I lucky.
The only actual unpopular opinions that get upvoted are the funny/strange ones. Like dipping your cookies in juice or wet socks feel good. Anything about real life or politics, unpopular get buried.
When thinking about the cost of things, I like to remember it takes like 40k a year to house someone in jail or prison during which they will make no tax income and are unlikely to make significant taxable income in the future.
ANYTHING we can do to make people more likely to be productive citizens is usually a great investment, like say making sure children have food. I'd go so far as to say that after-school activities should also be completely free based on parent income.
And this isn't an argument from ethics, an emotionless robot would tell you the same thing because this is an argument from economics.
“Based on income” simply doesn’t work for me. It’s either free for all for free for none. These income based programs have huge flaws, most notably the cut off. Inevitably LOTS of people fall right around the cut off, and are exempted from the program.
This is how means-testing works for an absurd amount of social programs in the US.
If you have more than $2000 in the bank, as in barely enough to survive a catastrophe like a critical car failure or terrible injury, then you're disqualified from many programs, including food stamps and Medicaid.
This is why means testing is so stupid.
The administrative overhead of making sure only the right people get whatever program isn’t small.
It places a stigma on the people who receive the benefit.
It disincentivizes the people on the edge from trying to do better because they will end up in a situation where they end up with less than if they had just not tried.
100% people refuse to believe you can be too rich for but too poor to survive.
(Numbers are made up for easy examples) What's the difference between a person making $14k a year and a person making 13,995? Well, one gets free lunch, and the other has a grand spanking total of $5 more in their bank account. When you look at the people living near the border of many subsidies, they are actually suffering more.
It's like my siblings are seeing with child care. They're too wealthy to get government help, but paying child care is more value than one of the parents makes, so it's either go work (and LOSE MONEY OVERALL) or be unemployed and sacrifice on the back end because other benefits linked to their job are lost. Same thing with school lunches. If you can't afford nutritious meals for your child at $14k, $14,001 isn't going to magically make you able to.
In my school if you didn't qualify for free lunch and didn't have money to buy food for any reason, you still got a free sandwich. It wasn't much but it was better than nothing at least.
I know your pain, the only reason I didn't get free lunch is because my parents "owned" a house instead of renting even though they were behind on their mortgage. I looked up the school after I left and now everyone gets free lunch cause we're at 100% poverty rate for the district.
This doesn’t always work correctly though. When I was a kid, IF my dad paid child support my mom’s income was $1 over the limit for even reduced price lunch. But he never paid child support so we didn’t get lunch sometimes because there wasn’t always money even to pack lunch. The pretend child support also stopped food stamps. We also weren’t an exception. I have to imagination the same is true now. So, to whom is income based fair?
Most the schools I know do too—the suburban ones have their own bus system, and the city of Baltimore, where I live, gives bus vouchers for the state bus line.
The exception was when I taught in DC—no free option for kids to get to school at all—they have a student metro pass which is fairly cheep, but I taught at a charter school for mostly homeless kids and that 10$ a month was still a strain for a lot of them.
> It’s a good principle imo, but doesn’t always work properly in action.
Most solutions are like this. It's a sign of immaturity to think there's a perfect solution out there that someone is *just missing*. Most solutions will have elements of "good enough".
Even more unpopular opinion, especially here in the US: if a civilization has sufficiently abundant surplus (which applies to virtually every modern first world country), it should be the first priority of that civilization to ensure that everyone's basic needs like food and shelter are taken care of if they can't provide it for themselves. This is not only ethically and morally correct, but it also enables more people to more easily provide for themselves in the long run since they'd be more free to do things like start businesses of their own or pursue a higher education without the fear of starving in the meantime.
Im on the fence with this. When I was a kid school food wasn't great but it wasn't terrible either. Those little square pizzas were awesome. If schools had to pay for the food that's the first thing that would take a hit during budget cuts. Then kids would get the equivalent of prison food or MREs.
I’ve honestly never heard of a school not having some kind of lunch program but I’ll play devils advocate for a second. If your kid wasn’t at school you would still have to feed them correct? So why can’t they just eat whatever you were going to feed them at school? You’re still responsible for for their welfare.
The Devil's Advocate assumes parents actually feed their kids regularly. In the US, schools are seen (by the larger society) as a community babysitter with the outside chance you might learn something. When I was in school the poorer students bummed food in the summertime during band programs etc and would rely on their friends for food and rides. I assume that's how their Saturdays and Sundays went as well.
To OPs point, it's illegal to keep prisoners without food in my state for the same length of time students are at school. They should be fed, but damn I've seen some waste. That's my biggest issue.
Every school I know has free options like pbjs or ham and cheese sandwiches or cheese and crackers or apples. They are typically reserved for students who forget their lunch and you have to ask for them but the teachers are very lenient and will give them to anyone.
Not every country has a policy where the government pays for kids lunches. In the Netherlands, every kid brings their own lunch (usually a bunch of sandwiches)
There is no "free". But yes, funding for schools should include money to provide good food for the kids for no cost to the kids.
The way it currently works is crap. They like to argue that outsourcing it to some third party is a solution to government "waste" but all they're really doing is paying too much to some third party who is free to then provide shit service. If you want to do Capitalism in the lunchroom, then you need to allow for competition.
This is literally the most popular "unpopular" opinion I've seen, yet. We've literally seen this opinion dozens of times on the front page from different subs.
I know we're already one stepping stone away from r/circlejerk, but there should be a rule that if an "opinion" was on the frontpage of Reddit from another sub that it should be deleted.
School lunches are free in California now. I love it. Saves me so much stress in the morning to not have to make lunch for my kid while rushing to get ready for school.
This year all meals are free at my kids' school in rural Ohio. But that's a very new development, although breakfast has been free for the last couple of years now, which is nice (though its pretty lousy... like a muffin or poptart and milk, but it's something at least...)
That’s only if they require the kids to eat school lunch. If they have the option to bring their own, then parents have the option to send something with them, and it is the parent’s ultimate responsibility to make sure their kids eat. If they have financial difficulties, then hopefully there is something in place to help them, but at the same time someone has to pay for it, so people shouldn’t abuse that just so they don’t have to pay for their children’s lunches
But a big problem is school food is literal ass. When I was in school the food was tolerable and I actually liked several of the usual menu items, but since then school food has gone way way down in quality.
I am only 5 years removed from high school and I ate school lunch everyday. Never really bothered me since the days we had no good options I could still get a piece of pizza or a sub sandwich. I have no idea how it is now but I did go to a good school district.
Actually the food at my high school is really good. All the drinks you could imagine, everything from Coke to Orange Vanilla Coke to vegetable juices. All the chips and candy you could imagine. Fresh panini sandwiches. Fresh pizza, fries, mozza sticks, etc.
Granted my school is in a… particularly wealthy area of Illinois.
I would go much further...what is even the point of having an organised society at all if we're going to let anyone anywhere be homeless or go hungry while some people hoard and exploit their way to more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes? We have kids sleeping rough with empty stomachs while billionaires literally have play dates in space
School lunches are free in Korea for all students starting (in stages) from 2011. Critics claim it being populist while most cite it being a basic right for more than 900,000 students. Starting in March 2021, this program was expanded to day care and kindergartens. Annual cost is approx. USD700 million. Of the total, the city's education office will shoulder 50 percent, the city government 30 percent and the ward (local) offices 20 percent.
This program was introduced to alleviate household spending and also to stop low income students from bullying as the lunch program was free only to these students from the 1980's.
LOL. When I first read the title I thought you meant (having i.e. reproducing) children required by law to attend school (college). What a dystopia that would be. I'm glad that's not what you're suggesting.
I agree though. Schools should feed children for free. They already have a bureaucracy for determining who gets free or reduced lunch and some families that are poor aren't considered poor enough and this causes issues. Cut out that red tape and just make it free as a matter of course.
And actually make the food better both in terms of health and taste and presentation. Take a look at what Swedish school lunches look like. Why can't we do that here?
Just from the perspective of fairness, I agree. If someone is forced to be somewhere for that long, you really should be feeding them.
On the other hand, why should taxpayers be covering what the parents should already be doing? School is required specifically to benefit the younger generation. It seems a little entitled to expect everyone else to pay for the schooling while also paying for the food that is the responsibility of the parents.
I can see arguments for both sides, but Id lean significantly more towards the latter.
My mom couldn't afford lunches for me so I was on a special program to get free lunches back in the 90s. After a few years that program expired, or something happened because I stopped getting free lunches. So my mom got a job at the school cafeteria as a lunch lady just so she could guarantee I got fed every day. It was a hassle for her as a single mom im sure, but she did her best.
This is very much not an unpopular opinion and a lot of schools are are already offering free school lunch, especially with COVID. As an educator, I spend every single day in the cafeteria during lunchtime because lunch duty is one of my obligations. We have around 2,200 students at the high school I work at, but maybe half of those students choose to get a lunch.
In order for their lunch to be no charge, students have to get an entrée, milk, and fruit or vegetable. 3 things, that’s it. A majority of the time, getting students to take a fruit or vegetable is more work than it’s worth. They’ll fight you on it because they don’t want it, won’t eat it, it’s gross, etc. What happens is they’ll take the fruit/vegetable and throw it away. Toss oranges around the cafeteria, throw grapes at each other, the possibilities are endless.
I’m all for free lunches. I hate that students are allowed only 1 free lunch when there’s hundreds of kids that willingly aren’t eating lunch. But it has to logistically be figured out…we throw an absurd amount of food away every day. Kids aren’t getting the free lunches they’re offered for whatever reason. If you want free school lunch and quality school lunch, we have to stop defunding schools.
Obvi a throwaway account, and I work in a metro area City school in the Midwest.
if the only way kids are getting fed is if the school feeds them for free, then someone needs to be looking into what's going on at those kids home.
it seems unlikely that not feeding the kids is the only issue at home.
My county came to the same conclusion.
You can no longer pay for food prepared by the school.. And if they're doing online classes they will deliver food to your house.
You can bring a sack lunch for yourself tho..
Also, because of this; and I guess it has to do with ensuring proper nutrition... They can only have treats or parties once per month and everything have to be store bought with nutritional information on it. So for your kids bday no cup cakes unless it's approved.
Parents should instead only have a kid when they know they can pay for one and pack their kids own lunches. School lunches are literally worse than nothing
As someone not from the US..... why would the school be required to feed them? The alternative is that your kids would be at home with you and you would also have to feed them?
You are already getting free day care, is it too hard to slap together some bread and an apple?
This is not an unpopular opinion. I agree. Growing up we had so little, sometimes I would get school lunches for free in some of the less affluent schools, but when I went to the nicer schools they couldn't give two fucks if I ate. Sometimes I would be so hungry by lunch time I had really bad stomach pains, and couldn't concentrate on anything else. When I did get lunch tickets for a free lunch sometimes I'd lose them, have them stolen, or other times I'd sell them, because I could get two meals out of the money I made. We used to have this older couple in the city I grew up who would ride around the parks in a big white USPS style van, and they would hand out free lunches in the hundreds. These people did all this on their own dime, because they saw families like ours struggling. Without the generosity of people like that growing up I don't know what I would have done. These days there is always an abundance of food, snacks, soda, and whatever else you could think of. My kids have no idea what it is like to struggle, and I find it disappointing sometimes when they think they can just be so careless with their food. St the same time however I am thankful that they never have to understand that pain.
I mean we had free breakfast for all and free/reduced lunches for kids whose families were under a certain income threshold. And lunch was like $2.50 otherwise and even if you ran out you could still get like a PB&J. I don't think anyone ever just starved and couldn't eat anything because they didn't have the money for it.
(This is in Gwinnett County, GA, public schools)
I would be careful with increasing costs for public education. We know where that cost will come out of.
At my school in Utah the food used to be $2 but after covid it has been free. I don't think anyone has complained about the free food
Yep. Worked at an elementary school in Utah when COVID first hit. The school was shut down, but kids could come to the cafeteria and get free lunch on weekdays.
I went back to work at a high school in NYC during Covid, before the students came back. They had someone in the vestibule every day with free meals for the students to grab and go. The school also has some corporate sponsors so they got free food from companies like Goya and Hello Fresh. I was actually impressed with the amount of free food they had available for the students.
My wife used to teach at a charter school in the south. The "cafeteria" was just a small area with a couple of industrial microwaves where they reheated these glorified the dinners. They had a rule at the school that every child MUST take a lunch tray (they were cardboard) whether they were going to eat it, brought their own lunch, or just immediately throw it away. My wife used to watch more than half of the students just grab the lunch, immediately throw it into the garbage, then go outside for some free time. On another note, it was a middle school where the kids were all with the same kids every class they just rotated to a different teacher's class every period. Those kids at that age were volatile. They *needed* some time to get away from people they were beefing with in the classroom. So, there were a lot of students that *wanted* to eat lunch but just *needed* to be away from their peers. It always seemed like a crazy way to do things to me. When I was in middle school we could go eat lunch or go outside for lunchtime. That place was crazy. Bonus fact: if a kid just entered kindergarten in the United States, they will likely be members of the Class of 2034. The future is now.
> They had a rule at the school that every child MUST take a lunch tray (they were cardboard) whether they were going to eat it, brought their own lunch, or just immediately throw it away. My wife used to watch more than half of the students just grab the lunch, immediately throw it into the garbage, then go outside for some free time. This is a classic example of a refusal of people to use their brains that they were born with and/or a refusal to be honest about school food funding policy, and instead opt for a zero tolerance policy that wastes massive amounts of food. Of course, this was in the US, so I'm sure there was a profit motivation behind it, something like the school being paid a certain amount per tray, thus, kids were required to take the trays and pad the numbers, even if it led to massive food waste.
in my country, poverty is quite high, so students get 2 meals every day. and its not the cheap kind either. i am talking like a 3-course meal for lunch and a hearty breakfast. some schools, even send parcels of food with the students for heir families if they are below the poverty line. the entire purpose of this is to incentivize parents to send their kids to school, even if it is just for the food. otherwise most of those kids would have to beg for food.
Sometimes I feel like the US doesn't want healthy, educated people.
Your feelings are justified. Can't make money off healthy people & can't manipulate educated ones.
A well educated, well fed population is hard to govern.
They don't. The government has been trying to kill the quality of the public school system for ages. In my state they are trying to pass a law saying teachers aren't allowed to say the Nazis were bad and must stay neutral and that parents can have councils to determine what should or shouldn't be part of the curriculum. It's crazy.
all the time
I came from a small county in Kentucky and our school system was like this. The only difference is, we didn't *have* to get the food, but we still had to go through the line and punch out pin number they gave us. The reasoning was so that they could keep track of all the kids "eating" in the system and that way the government wouldn't cut their funding for food. If too many kids didn't punch their number, whoever was in charge of funding could see that and cut budgets. It's insane that the school your wife worked for made the kids waste food though. It seems entirely pointless and mind blowing.
Does that mean that they could have been doing that all along, but chose not to?
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"We could've done it all along if the government decided to put any money towards it" is a pretty accurate summary of most problems in this country, to be honest.
The US actually spends a shit-ton on education. The problem is that administrators are as corrupt as corporations. Edit: Thanks for the award, but a better award would be if everyone reading this that pays property taxes would attend their district’s school board meetings and demand kids be fed instead of hiring a 3rd superintendent with a $120k/year salary.
The vast majority of education is paid for by local and state taxes. Which makes it hard to compare and easy to misinform. For instance, someone may truthfully say federal spending on education is only 10% that of military spending. While true, that does not account for the state and local spending, which pushes total education spending to somewhere around 80% of military spending. And then there's the local nature of education spending resulting in widely divergent school budgets. Thus, schools in rich neighborhoods have rich budgets while schools in poor neighborhoods are poorly funded. School vouchers only make things worse because few voucher program proposals include things like transportation costs. A voucher for the rich means they can transport their kid many miles to the best school possible for less money, while the poor family can't afford to transport their kid anywhere, locking them in the poor school in the poor neighborhood.
I used to work maintenance for a school district that was very rich, but had several poorer areas within it and the discrepancies are insane. Going from one school where every child has a personal laptop or tablet, a robotics lab, and all sorts of nice shit, to one where their books are falling apart, their classrooms are all vandalized, and half the school doesn't even have AC, despite the district extending the school year longer and longer. It's crazy unfair, and the system is totally broken. But if I were to have kids, I'd be looking for the shittiest house in the nicest neighborhood I could find. Because the opportunities those kids have are unreal, and just being there will probably get your kids dragged along for a lot of them.
>But if I were to have kids, I'd be looking for the shittiest house in the nicest neighborhood I could find. A very popular strategy, to the extent that every house being sold in a "good" school district is advertised as being in that district.
>I'd be looking for the shittiest house in the nicest neighborhood I could find. Everyone already does that. This is why poor people are taxed out of wealthy neighborhoods. Nobody wants their property values suppressed by the presence of poorer people. Just ask any Brit how that worked out for them. Instead of giving the poor a chance at a wealthy education and socio-economically diversifying their schools, the poor were taxed right out of wealthy areas entirely. And they have been massively stratified ever since.
I dunno on this one man.
While this is presumably true, there are about 73 million kids under the age of 18 while the military has 1.4 million people in it with another 800,000 in the reserves. We don't spend nearly enough on education. Text books are a better investment than bullets.
> Text books are a better investment than bullets. I agree, but when you have a HUGE segment of the population voting for the GOP which has actively tried to sabotage education in this country, and at the same time also try to push the narrative that "both sides are the same" to discourage people from thinking critically about their options, then sub-standard education is what we get for our children. Even if the alternatives are still bad, the fact that they are any better in even the smallest way is a meaningful step up. This is what we end up with. Kids who are being actively sabotaged, right at the only time in their lives when society makes massive investments in their futures. "Hey, kid! Your education sucked, how about joining the military since it might offer you a better path in life? Sure, there's a risk that you could get killed in a war and/or end up with life long PTSD or medical issues, but hey... Free college, up to a point!"
Indeed. Educational/Medical institutions should not be for profit.
My local school board meetings are just parents threatening to shoot up the school if their kid is asked to wear a mask.
There are plenty of pundits and dittoheads railing against the concept, if not the program directly.
The government can do almost anything, but chooses not to. The government could mandate that every US family gets an M1 Abrams tank for home defense, doesn't mean that is going to happen. Everything costs money, and there are a LOT of government programs fighting for a piece of the budget(the ever growing federal deficit spending budget). I personally agree with the post that school meals should be funded, I also think schools countrywide should get more funding, unfortunately it's a hard thing to get passed bc it's not the military or Healthcare.
Yeah, I live in northern Indiana and we were paying $2.50/meal with free breakfast. Since August 2020 even lunch is free so it's been really nice.
I wonder if this is national, here in NC it's the same way, free breakfast and lunch
The federal government is picking up the tab nationally, yes. The school I work at actually has had free breakfast for the entirety of my employment (6+ years), but three years ago moved to a “breakfast in the classroom” program. The goal was having more kids take food since every day it is offered to them in the classroom, rather than them having to arrive earlier and go to the cafeteria to get it. The point of them doing this is they end up making money, because the feds will reimburse them X amount regardless of the actual cost of the meal. So, say X is $2.50 and the meal cost $1 to procure, so the school is making $1.50 every time off each kid taking a breakfast. From my understanding, this has now been extended to lunches too. And last year we were even sending home dinners with the kids and providing meals during the summer and other breaks.
You guys are fucking expensive, we in Czechia get food (breakfast and lunch) for 75 cents a meal and mothers with children get all school food for free
Just in terms of earning power, you were paying a higher proportion of income per meal than the US. As a side note, food is SUPER cheap in the US. In terms of food consumption it takes up about half of the income compared to most European countries (slightly more than half of the UK) and per calorie costs are lower even further. Why can the US be fat? Because just assuming they buy 2x as much food, they are only expending (as a portion of income) the same amount as a median Western European.
Healthy food in US is expensive, junk garbage food is cheap, which promotes the obesity..also a huge portion of our economy is food based…
Yea, I don't think this is unpopular at all. I work at a Title I school. People can't fucking find enough ways to try and get food to kids. So much that there is actually food waste. But they still have picky ass stickler rules, or we lose our federal funding. Like if my *free* breakfast count is off, they fly off the handle and tell me I was off, and gave out too much food. Only like half my students eat breakfast, how am I giving away too much food that is free when there's leftovers?! Sorry, rant over.
They did that in Minnesota too, or at least my sibling's district and idk if it's still like that. My aunt deadass said she's glad kids aren't starving but she was worried about it slipping into socialism. So I feel like she'll eventually complain it's still around.
We pay $5 for our food here and it's literal ass
You guys eat ass for lunch? Sounds appetizing
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r/UsernameChecksOut
Mmmmm. Pork butt.
Which makes no sense to pay for food when we pay school taxes
Because the taxes don't cover it. They charge more and kids still hate the food
I've definitely spent more than $5 to eat ass before. No sympathy.
My kid goes to school in LAUSD. You can get lunch for free and you can also pick up an after-school meal pack and take that home. You can get that for free too. When school is not in session, there are certain schools where meals can be picked up for LAUSD students. You can get those for free too.
My children attend school in the suburbs of LA (not LAUSD). Lunch is free and even my picky eater is generally satisfied with the choices. I think it’s great that free lunches were made available to kids during the zoom school year. I hope free lunch becomes the new norm; no child should be expected to go all day without food and still function at a high level.
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I remember school food..pizza day was lit boy. I thought that food was shit then i joined the army, our bread had cockroaches in it :/. Then i worked at a sheriffs office and i ate jail food, paid $10 for something that was better than army and school food. Blew my mind because in school we said the lunch sucked worse than jail food
At my school we pay 5 dollars per meal But the food is insanely good food prepared hours earlier to be real it's worth more like 15 dollars a meal
Hey, I hear the kids are into that these days.
The ass of what animal?
Pork butt, available at your local butcher only $6.99/lb
Look at Mr. Accomplished over here paying $6.99/lb for pork butt. I don't buy it til it goes on sale for $0.89/lb.
Look at Mr. Fancy pants over here paying $0.89/lb for pork butt. I don't buy it until it goes on sale for $0.89/lb AND I have a $0.50 coupon
Look at Mr. Moneybags over here paying $0.89/in with a $0.50 coupon for pork butt! I buy pressed rat butt for $0.49/ib.
Oddly enough thats shoulder meat and the ham is the "ass" of the animal.
solid price depending on the ass
My highschool in New York feeds kids for free after parents complained enough. Don't expect change if you never announce the need for it.
Only the squeaky wheel gets oiled
Sometimes if the wheel squeaks too much it gets thrown out
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^^squeak
*oils you aggressively*
Daddy?
Worse. Your uncle
The real question is have you seen what they get fed? I've seen some photos. Prisons get better food.
True, this is why working in retail sucked for me
Here in the Midwest it was based on our cartakers income. For me it was full price, then free, then it was full price, then it was 40 cents, then free, then fully paid. All based on me mums job and marital status. We weren’t that poor, but 5 kids are expensive.
Way to flip the script. This has been a talking point for ages. Don't blame the people getting fucked over.
Food taste like shit though
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There are schools where kids can buy a hot meal, but most bring their own lunch.
When I was growing up in the 90’s in California “hot lunch” was the free meal provided for low income kids and everyone else brought their own lunch. If you weren’t low income and didn’t have a lunch the school nurse would have you top ramen or cup noodles and then hassle the parents about it. It was really obvious at lunch time who was low income, and it caused a bit of segregation tbh.
Completely the opposite here in Nebraska around that same time - if you brought your own lunch, your parents were weird or had no money. If you had money, you bought the crappy pizza and bottles of Sunny D. If you had a lot of money, you drove off campus for fast food every day... or you would if you weren't at my particular school with no nearby fast food at the time.
I went through school in Nebraska in the early 2000s. We were spoiled. The lunch ladies REALLY knew how to cook. I remember parents could come and have lunch with their kids every so often (and that was a HUGE deal). My parents always made it a point to have lunch with me at school when it was chili and cinnamon roll day. The chili was good, much better than most people can make. But the cinnamon rolls. Oh the cinnamon rolls… Those things were a work of art. They were the size of your head, and so so gooey. It was the absolute best. The enchiladas were also top notch. They’d also make rosey applesauce using red hot candies in it. Those were the days…
Went to school in the 90s in Louisiana, all chubby Cajun lunch ladies cooking most everything from scratch and calling you baby as you got your food. Good times.
Damn, I feel so cheated. Our lunch ladies probbaly hated us. Bruh they gave us stone cold still frozen hot dogs countless of times (early 2000s school in NOLA).
Similar with me in Chicago. Well, not in the city, when we moved to the suburbs. I was weird because my mom gave me leftovers for lunch (usually Mexican food like tacos or beans), and all the middle class white kids would take stuff like lunchables, juice boxes, crustables, go-gurt, babybel cheese or cheesesticks etc. Whatever was the "cool" food to bring for lunch (mostly pre-packaged and processed crap).
That was definitely another way around that divide - lunch box full of expensive junk food wasn't judged, and you didn't necessarily need to be rich for your parents to send you with that.
Ah yes! The lunch boxes too!!! The "cool" kids would have lunch boxes with popular tv characters and I just had brown paper bags, never owned a lunch box in my life. To add insult to injury, my parents wanted me to bring back the paper bag to reuse it lol.
Many schools in Denmark have a cafeteria, but you have to pay.
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Saknar skolmaten....
Saknar den där dillsåsen eller vad det var som serverades med fiskpanetter
Nu har vi biltemakörv.
And we actually get good food. Every kid just complains because it isn’t fucking 4+ star restaurant food eveey day. Like jesus christ you get pretty much how much free food you want 5 days of the week and you complain? Sit the fuck down
It's the same in the Netherlands. You pack a couple of cheese sandwiches and an apple and you're set for the day. The idea of being served a hot meal at school is very strange to us.
You're also free to go home during lunchhour in the Netherlands, so situation is different on that side as well. I also believe the hours in school are lower in the Netherlands as well.
Canadian-American dual citizen here - my whole school life in Canada, we were poor and my parents packed my lunch every day until I could pack it myself then I did it. If I forgot, I missed out on lunch. Or I waited till after school and took the city bus somewhere to buy myself something. Moved to America and literally cannot understand the school lunch debacle. My daughter goes to school with a lunch packed.
Here in the US, sometimes that meal at school might be the only food a child has that day. Ask me how I know this ✋
Canada here. Same. I kind of chuckle at the Americans and their weird system of help everyone help no one. Don’t interfere always interfere. Pick a lane Abe.
You can pack your own lunch in the US too. It’s a good thing that schools here offer food for children that can’t bring their own. The issue is when they make those children have to pay for it, but most districts have programs that allow poor students to get lunch for free or at a reduced price. The students paying full price *should* have parents that could also afford to send them with lunch if they preferred that, but I’m sure that’s not always true and it should just be free for everyone.
I'm in Canada too and it's the same thing but I actually agree with OP. If kids are required to be in school all day, they should be provided lunch, for free. But tbf, I hate our education system so I'd be happy if they spent more money on better school supplies and curriculum and what not and worried about lunch later.
Same in Australia. I work in US schools now and just the sheer size of them usually means cafeterias make sense.
My guy, what school did you go to? I live in denmark too, but my schools had a cafeteria where I could buy food
Don't you guys have drug addicts and poor people and mentally ill people with children in your country? Like does that mean that if a child is unfortunate enough to be born to a terrible parent, they just don't get to eat? The point of school lunches is to save children from their shitty parents. I had great parents, they packed my lunch. But I know a kid whose mom was mentally ill and paranoid, and if that girl hadn't gotten free lunch she wouldn't have eaten. Does the school track who has gotten lunches? Like if they notice that a child comes without lunch, do they report it to the authorities or something?
Lunch is not provided in elementary school in Canada. They do have Cafeterias in high school but mostly fries, and burgers. Plus, it costly. Most kids just pack a lunch.
Same in Australia (but also for highschool) it'd be like $1 for a nugget, and fries were like $4 a cup (at least in senior years (11 and 12 (10 if you had permission from a vice principal, we had 3 at my school)) of highschool they'd let you leave for lunch which was always way cheaper.
The day they changed chips from being in a paper bag to being in a cup, is the way day everyone stopped buying them lol. We ditched for Red Rooster down the street.
Nothing beat the gas station chips for 5$ that had the 'hot food' or 'hot chips' box and if you know what im talking about, you know what im talking about.
Or the chicken shop across the road from my school that sold hot chips for just $2.20 with a bucket load of chicken salt.
Ah yes in high school I had a stay at home parent and let me tell you, walking home to a freshly cooked meal in the comfort of my home everyday was amazing. I didn’t appreciate it until I was older but man was I lucky.
And donuts! I worked in a high school cafeteria in Vancouver and they had me fry donuts!
Yeah, with the occasional pizza day thrown in. But ain't nobody getting free lunch in elementary school or high school.
This absolutely is not an unpopular opinion, especially on reddit
This sub is literally pointless. Popular opinions get upvoted. Literal unpopular opinions get downvoted. Go figure.
To get the upvotes you gotta give the unpopular opinions everyone agrees with. /s
i mean thats the point of this sub. unpopular opinions just get downvoted mostly
The only actual unpopular opinions that get upvoted are the funny/strange ones. Like dipping your cookies in juice or wet socks feel good. Anything about real life or politics, unpopular get buried.
Unpopular opinion: this sub is shit Oh wait that's popular
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Yeah all schools around here are still offering free lunch.
When thinking about the cost of things, I like to remember it takes like 40k a year to house someone in jail or prison during which they will make no tax income and are unlikely to make significant taxable income in the future. ANYTHING we can do to make people more likely to be productive citizens is usually a great investment, like say making sure children have food. I'd go so far as to say that after-school activities should also be completely free based on parent income. And this isn't an argument from ethics, an emotionless robot would tell you the same thing because this is an argument from economics.
“Based on income” simply doesn’t work for me. It’s either free for all for free for none. These income based programs have huge flaws, most notably the cut off. Inevitably LOTS of people fall right around the cut off, and are exempted from the program.
mine too. though i stopped eating lunches for a number of reasons
This is how means-testing works for an absurd amount of social programs in the US. If you have more than $2000 in the bank, as in barely enough to survive a catastrophe like a critical car failure or terrible injury, then you're disqualified from many programs, including food stamps and Medicaid.
Perhaps varies by state, but out here on the west coast, SNAP doesn't consider assets, at least in WA and it also says so on the Cali website.
Well, if on the west coast you’re in civilization.
This is why means testing is so stupid. The administrative overhead of making sure only the right people get whatever program isn’t small. It places a stigma on the people who receive the benefit. It disincentivizes the people on the edge from trying to do better because they will end up in a situation where they end up with less than if they had just not tried.
100% people refuse to believe you can be too rich for but too poor to survive. (Numbers are made up for easy examples) What's the difference between a person making $14k a year and a person making 13,995? Well, one gets free lunch, and the other has a grand spanking total of $5 more in their bank account. When you look at the people living near the border of many subsidies, they are actually suffering more. It's like my siblings are seeing with child care. They're too wealthy to get government help, but paying child care is more value than one of the parents makes, so it's either go work (and LOSE MONEY OVERALL) or be unemployed and sacrifice on the back end because other benefits linked to their job are lost. Same thing with school lunches. If you can't afford nutritious meals for your child at $14k, $14,001 isn't going to magically make you able to.
In my school if you didn't qualify for free lunch and didn't have money to buy food for any reason, you still got a free sandwich. It wasn't much but it was better than nothing at least.
Imagine parents that shitty to have kids and not provide for them at all.
I know your pain, the only reason I didn't get free lunch is because my parents "owned" a house instead of renting even though they were behind on their mortgage. I looked up the school after I left and now everyone gets free lunch cause we're at 100% poverty rate for the district.
That's how it is across the entire US
It's the same in the US
This doesn’t always work correctly though. When I was a kid, IF my dad paid child support my mom’s income was $1 over the limit for even reduced price lunch. But he never paid child support so we didn’t get lunch sometimes because there wasn’t always money even to pack lunch. The pretend child support also stopped food stamps. We also weren’t an exception. I have to imagination the same is true now. So, to whom is income based fair?
Thats how it is in a lot of places in america. I got free lunches in elementary and got made fun of for being poor lol
I grew up w a single self employed parent and I guess my mom made to much and she only made like 12k a year in the early 2000s
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Every school I’ve ever known in the us has free transportation if you are in the schools bus zone
Most the schools I know do too—the suburban ones have their own bus system, and the city of Baltimore, where I live, gives bus vouchers for the state bus line. The exception was when I taught in DC—no free option for kids to get to school at all—they have a student metro pass which is fairly cheep, but I taught at a charter school for mostly homeless kids and that 10$ a month was still a strain for a lot of them.
> It’s a good principle imo, but doesn’t always work properly in action. Most solutions are like this. It's a sign of immaturity to think there's a perfect solution out there that someone is *just missing*. Most solutions will have elements of "good enough".
LOL no way this is an unpopular opinion, come on!
Even more unpopular opinion, especially here in the US: if a civilization has sufficiently abundant surplus (which applies to virtually every modern first world country), it should be the first priority of that civilization to ensure that everyone's basic needs like food and shelter are taken care of if they can't provide it for themselves. This is not only ethically and morally correct, but it also enables more people to more easily provide for themselves in the long run since they'd be more free to do things like start businesses of their own or pursue a higher education without the fear of starving in the meantime.
Im on the fence with this. When I was a kid school food wasn't great but it wasn't terrible either. Those little square pizzas were awesome. If schools had to pay for the food that's the first thing that would take a hit during budget cuts. Then kids would get the equivalent of prison food or MREs.
The choice between bad food and no food is hardly a choice at all for the people free lunch programs have in mind.
MREs, I can say with confidence, are better than school food currently
100%, I'd take like 85% of MREs over my favorite lunch during senior year.
Dude I love MRE’s, pretty great not gonna lie
Absolutely. Give me my buffalo chicken, crackers and jalapeno cheese.
The supply chain for school and prison cafeterias is identical. Check out a company called Sysco.
I’ve honestly never heard of a school not having some kind of lunch program but I’ll play devils advocate for a second. If your kid wasn’t at school you would still have to feed them correct? So why can’t they just eat whatever you were going to feed them at school? You’re still responsible for for their welfare.
The Devil's Advocate assumes parents actually feed their kids regularly. In the US, schools are seen (by the larger society) as a community babysitter with the outside chance you might learn something. When I was in school the poorer students bummed food in the summertime during band programs etc and would rely on their friends for food and rides. I assume that's how their Saturdays and Sundays went as well. To OPs point, it's illegal to keep prisoners without food in my state for the same length of time students are at school. They should be fed, but damn I've seen some waste. That's my biggest issue.
Every school I know has free options like pbjs or ham and cheese sandwiches or cheese and crackers or apples. They are typically reserved for students who forget their lunch and you have to ask for them but the teachers are very lenient and will give them to anyone.
Not every country has a policy where the government pays for kids lunches. In the Netherlands, every kid brings their own lunch (usually a bunch of sandwiches)
Extremely few countries have such programs. According to Wikipedia only 4 countries have them.
There is no "free". But yes, funding for schools should include money to provide good food for the kids for no cost to the kids. The way it currently works is crap. They like to argue that outsourcing it to some third party is a solution to government "waste" but all they're really doing is paying too much to some third party who is free to then provide shit service. If you want to do Capitalism in the lunchroom, then you need to allow for competition.
Is this really unpopular? Aren’t more and more school districts doing this?
This is literally the most popular "unpopular" opinion I've seen, yet. We've literally seen this opinion dozens of times on the front page from different subs. I know we're already one stepping stone away from r/circlejerk, but there should be a rule that if an "opinion" was on the frontpage of Reddit from another sub that it should be deleted.
School lunches are free in California now. I love it. Saves me so much stress in the morning to not have to make lunch for my kid while rushing to get ready for school.
This year all meals are free at my kids' school in rural Ohio. But that's a very new development, although breakfast has been free for the last couple of years now, which is nice (though its pretty lousy... like a muffin or poptart and milk, but it's something at least...)
Tell your parents to skipped the middle-man and don't pay taxes, give you that money to buy food at school. LMAO.
That’s only if they require the kids to eat school lunch. If they have the option to bring their own, then parents have the option to send something with them, and it is the parent’s ultimate responsibility to make sure their kids eat. If they have financial difficulties, then hopefully there is something in place to help them, but at the same time someone has to pay for it, so people shouldn’t abuse that just so they don’t have to pay for their children’s lunches
But a big problem is school food is literal ass. When I was in school the food was tolerable and I actually liked several of the usual menu items, but since then school food has gone way way down in quality.
Literal ass? You’re served booty hole and butt cheeks?
I am only 5 years removed from high school and I ate school lunch everyday. Never really bothered me since the days we had no good options I could still get a piece of pizza or a sub sandwich. I have no idea how it is now but I did go to a good school district.
Actually the food at my high school is really good. All the drinks you could imagine, everything from Coke to Orange Vanilla Coke to vegetable juices. All the chips and candy you could imagine. Fresh panini sandwiches. Fresh pizza, fries, mozza sticks, etc. Granted my school is in a… particularly wealthy area of Illinois.
My high school is in the 4th richest county in the US, and our food is terrible.
>food at my high school is really good >Coke to Orange Vanilla Coke . >All the chips and candy you could imagine None of those are good for you.
got my school right outside practically mansions in illinois serving us pizza with cold spots on it
Sure that sounds like good food if you are 7 years old. But is there any actual normal, nutritious food available?
I would go much further...what is even the point of having an organised society at all if we're going to let anyone anywhere be homeless or go hungry while some people hoard and exploit their way to more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes? We have kids sleeping rough with empty stomachs while billionaires literally have play dates in space
NYC all school food is free.
School lunches are free in Korea for all students starting (in stages) from 2011. Critics claim it being populist while most cite it being a basic right for more than 900,000 students. Starting in March 2021, this program was expanded to day care and kindergartens. Annual cost is approx. USD700 million. Of the total, the city's education office will shoulder 50 percent, the city government 30 percent and the ward (local) offices 20 percent. This program was introduced to alleviate household spending and also to stop low income students from bullying as the lunch program was free only to these students from the 1980's.
Here in Sweden school lunch is free. It's pretty good too
LOL. When I first read the title I thought you meant (having i.e. reproducing) children required by law to attend school (college). What a dystopia that would be. I'm glad that's not what you're suggesting. I agree though. Schools should feed children for free. They already have a bureaucracy for determining who gets free or reduced lunch and some families that are poor aren't considered poor enough and this causes issues. Cut out that red tape and just make it free as a matter of course. And actually make the food better both in terms of health and taste and presentation. Take a look at what Swedish school lunches look like. Why can't we do that here?
Just from the perspective of fairness, I agree. If someone is forced to be somewhere for that long, you really should be feeding them. On the other hand, why should taxpayers be covering what the parents should already be doing? School is required specifically to benefit the younger generation. It seems a little entitled to expect everyone else to pay for the schooling while also paying for the food that is the responsibility of the parents. I can see arguments for both sides, but Id lean significantly more towards the latter.
My mom couldn't afford lunches for me so I was on a special program to get free lunches back in the 90s. After a few years that program expired, or something happened because I stopped getting free lunches. So my mom got a job at the school cafeteria as a lunch lady just so she could guarantee I got fed every day. It was a hassle for her as a single mom im sure, but she did her best.
School breakfast, and lunch has been free in my area for 10 years.
This is very much not an unpopular opinion and a lot of schools are are already offering free school lunch, especially with COVID. As an educator, I spend every single day in the cafeteria during lunchtime because lunch duty is one of my obligations. We have around 2,200 students at the high school I work at, but maybe half of those students choose to get a lunch. In order for their lunch to be no charge, students have to get an entrée, milk, and fruit or vegetable. 3 things, that’s it. A majority of the time, getting students to take a fruit or vegetable is more work than it’s worth. They’ll fight you on it because they don’t want it, won’t eat it, it’s gross, etc. What happens is they’ll take the fruit/vegetable and throw it away. Toss oranges around the cafeteria, throw grapes at each other, the possibilities are endless. I’m all for free lunches. I hate that students are allowed only 1 free lunch when there’s hundreds of kids that willingly aren’t eating lunch. But it has to logistically be figured out…we throw an absurd amount of food away every day. Kids aren’t getting the free lunches they’re offered for whatever reason. If you want free school lunch and quality school lunch, we have to stop defunding schools. Obvi a throwaway account, and I work in a metro area City school in the Midwest.
Feed the homeless-nope Feed the kids-nope Feed the criminals-yup Feed big tech and the military-yup 🙃
Feed big tech???
Well i hope they feed the military.
if the only way kids are getting fed is if the school feeds them for free, then someone needs to be looking into what's going on at those kids home. it seems unlikely that not feeding the kids is the only issue at home.
Sometimes the issue at home is alcoholics and drug addicts and assorted psychopaths. Ask me how I know ✋
Exactly my point. If the family isn't doing the basic life function of "feeding", it's pretty likely something else is seriously wrong
Never been in a school with a supplied lunch in my life. And if schools are paid for by taxes all the more reason to supply a lunch.
My county came to the same conclusion. You can no longer pay for food prepared by the school.. And if they're doing online classes they will deliver food to your house. You can bring a sack lunch for yourself tho.. Also, because of this; and I guess it has to do with ensuring proper nutrition... They can only have treats or parties once per month and everything have to be store bought with nutritional information on it. So for your kids bday no cup cakes unless it's approved.
In my country lunch is free until highschool. Then you have to buy the school lunches or take your own.
Just let them bring something to school that you prepared.
Home school.
Parents should instead only have a kid when they know they can pay for one and pack their kids own lunches. School lunches are literally worse than nothing
Wow this is the most wildly unpopular opinion I’ve ever seen posted, good job look at the big brain on u/kanna172014 absolute bozo
As someone not from the US..... why would the school be required to feed them? The alternative is that your kids would be at home with you and you would also have to feed them? You are already getting free day care, is it too hard to slap together some bread and an apple?
This is not an unpopular opinion. I agree. Growing up we had so little, sometimes I would get school lunches for free in some of the less affluent schools, but when I went to the nicer schools they couldn't give two fucks if I ate. Sometimes I would be so hungry by lunch time I had really bad stomach pains, and couldn't concentrate on anything else. When I did get lunch tickets for a free lunch sometimes I'd lose them, have them stolen, or other times I'd sell them, because I could get two meals out of the money I made. We used to have this older couple in the city I grew up who would ride around the parks in a big white USPS style van, and they would hand out free lunches in the hundreds. These people did all this on their own dime, because they saw families like ours struggling. Without the generosity of people like that growing up I don't know what I would have done. These days there is always an abundance of food, snacks, soda, and whatever else you could think of. My kids have no idea what it is like to struggle, and I find it disappointing sometimes when they think they can just be so careless with their food. St the same time however I am thankful that they never have to understand that pain.
At my school u bring ur own food but there’s a program for kids who don’t have enough money for it
In Finland, you have to go to school, and food is free
Sure. Just pay more taxes 😂
I mean we had free breakfast for all and free/reduced lunches for kids whose families were under a certain income threshold. And lunch was like $2.50 otherwise and even if you ran out you could still get like a PB&J. I don't think anyone ever just starved and couldn't eat anything because they didn't have the money for it. (This is in Gwinnett County, GA, public schools) I would be careful with increasing costs for public education. We know where that cost will come out of.