There was a minor error in the Nevada Appeal story on the free and reduced lunch recipients in the paper on Monday. Only at one elementary school do 85 percent of students qualify as poor…er, “low income.” Citywide the figure is “only” around 45 percent.
And as I suspected, the free lunch program does, in fact, also cover breakfasts. I received the following email from a teacher yesterday…
“Yes, that ‘Free Lunch’ does indeed include the tab for breakfast for these little darlings. Remember the day when people fed their own kids?
“Anyway, I thought that I’d share a story about a kid today. I was walking down the hallway at school and noticed a kid (1st grade) dancing down the hall. He had a multi-colored Mohawk and a huge smile. He was carrying a Health Pass so that he could go see the nurse.
“Noticing that this little bundle of energy didn’t look sick, I had to ask why he was going to the nurse when he didn’t really look like he needed to. He turned around and informed me that he had gone to the dentist earlier and that he just got to school. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon, by the way. Now, I had to ask if his teeth were bothering him. He turned around again and said, ‘Nope, I’m hungry and I have to get lunch.’
“Hmmm, so being that it was a half hour after the last lunch, I walked down to the nurse’s office. She read the pass, then took him into the cafeteria where she instructed the lunch ladies to prepare him a tray. He had no money, nor did he have his lunch card, so they just made him a tray and sent him on his way.
“My question is, if you send your child to school at 1:30 in the afternoon not fed, does he eat during the weekend or track-break while he is at home? I suppose that there is a free lunch program for the weekend called ‘food stamps,’ so I guess that the taxpayer loses again.”
Why am I not surprised?
Meanwhile in neighboring Arizona, just giving kids free lunches and breakfasts isn’t enough. This coming year some kids will actually be PAID $25 a week to go to school. I kid you not. Read it and weep here
How long before this “stuck on stupid” idea makes its way across the border and into Nevada’s public schools? Or is it already here and we don’t know about it? Hmmm…
Posted on August 9th, 2007 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: Carson City
Mr. Muth: Why does any of this surprise you? The attempt to provide universal all day kindergarten during the 2007 legislative session was nothing more than a thinly disguised attempt to provide state funded day care to five year olds. The lesson to be learned is that people will package things in a way that will achieve their objectives. We still live in a state that seems to be welfare averse, so people who support an expansion of the welfare state will get their programs in thru the back door. In this case, the back door is the education system.
According to Nevada’s Annual Reports of Accountability website, the Empire school is 71.4% hispanic and 50.3% (293 kids of the 593 enrolled in the school) are FRE (free/reduced lunch) supported; 9% of the school population is learning disabled; 63% of the school population is LEP (Students with Limited English Proficiency).
Of the whole school district 0.1% is comprised of migrant students.
A relevant impact is that teachers in “at risk” schools earn 5 years of pension for every 4 years served in such schools. What is an “at risk” school? 50%+1 of the kids are FRE supported.