Universal access to free school meals end this summer | Hacker News Reader

Universal access to free school meals end this summer

abc13.com

29 pointsserverlessmom47 comments

Ridiculous that they are framing it as ending because of Ukraine. The richest country in the world can afford $10B to feed children on top of everything else. Maybe they should send a team to India to figure out how they manage to provide free hot lunch to 130+ million schoolchildren every day.

Nice that you speak of India! Don't they want to help a bit with Ukraine, that would end faster and we could go back to providing free lunches !

Neoconservatism is a political orientation that can only exist in developed countries. “Fuck the poor [kids]” goes over like a lead balloon in developing countries.

> Neoconservatism is a political orientation that can only exist in developed countries. “Fuck the poor [kids]” goes over like a lead balloon in developing countries.

Isn't that Neoliberalism? Isn't Neoconservatism a foreign policy thing?

Yes, you’re correct, neoliberal is the proper term.

Political science has the same deal going on as topology with open and closed sets not being antonyms.

Most of the kids at my school hated the school provided lunches and instead chose to bring things from home. Those were paid for by parents, and in our school you made that choice: pay for crappy food or pay for good food you like that was made by mom and dad.

The school provided lunches that I heard about from someone who graduated recently sounded pretty marginal. I think people in this thread might be overestimating what's being lost.

> The richest country in the world can afford $10B to feed children on top of everything else.

This article makes it really unclear what's actually changing, but it sounds like they may be going back to means-testing the "free and reduced price" lunch program.

Looking at some other articles on the topic, this also means that the government will no longer grant "flexibility with nutrition standards," which sounds like it was something that permitted less nutritious meals to be served.

The richest country on earth AND the richest country in human history. And yet we have children without enough food.

I believe California and Maine are starting universal school lunch program since this year.

This is not an issue for the federal government to solve. States should set up their own systems as needed to solve their own unique needs. This is how the system of government is supposed to work in the US.

The federal program reimburses local schools who are able to adapt to local circumstances. https://www.fns.usda.gov/disaster/pandemic/cn-2021-22-waiver... is a long list of associated waivers allowing local flexibility. What "unique needs" aren't being met here?

Yes thank you I know that the federal government was reimbursing local schools during the pandemic. That's the entire point of this article.

However, education is at the state level, not the federal level. Individual states should fund their own school lunches as needed.

The need for school lunches is one lunch per child per day. Is there some more specific local need that the existing program is interfering with, like buying food from local producers or providing culturally appropriate meals? Or are you just stating support for some general libertarian position?

I'm stating a literal fact that education is funded locally and it always has been. Always as in the entire history of the United States.

According to the article, millions of kids who are getting free food from the schools won't be after June. So going forward the "local funding" for some kids will be out-of-pocket from lower-middle-income parents, and for other kids "local funding" will be going hungry. I don't think this is how things should be but if you disagree, all right.

I believe there should be guardrails to the idea of state-by-state experimentation; and that one of them should be “children should not go hungry.”

It’s just the decent, moral thing to do. Such a guardrail is appropriate at the federal level.

The federal government isn't directly involved with local education. States should be in charge of this, as they always have been. We need not bloat the federal budget further. Individual states are more than capable of funding themselves, as they always have.

And yet, kids go hungry. This temporary expansion seriously improved the situation. Why go back to the status quo, of kids going hungry?

Why would any individual state choose to let their citizens go hungry?

A great question. I don’t know why or how people can be so cruel.

And yet: kids go hungry. It happens, and so we should not allow it. If individual states choose to allow kids to go hungry, then those states should not be allowed to make that choice.

That’s why federal intervention is warranted. States don’t seem to be doing the right thing.

I dont understand why you have schools feeding kids?

its bizarre, the kids should either bring money to school for canteen or bring their own lunches to school like ours do.

In my country, school lunch cost 60 euro per month, down to 0 depending on your family (so, whn i was younger, my mother was a nurse making 15k/yr on a 80% contract, alone with 3 children, it cost us 0€). One big advantage was the we only ate potatoes the evening, and had actual lunches the rest of the time (i'm partially joking, i remember one month after an issue with our car where we ate potatoes with butter for two weeks)

In a significant number of places in the US a significant number of children are dependent on free school lunches. The lunches provide nutritional stability that the child may not receive at home. So much so that some places give lunches away even when school is not in session.

For example, in New York City: https://www.schools.nyc.gov/school-life/food/summer-meals

The reason is that there is a lot of food insecurity in the US. Kids regularly go hungry. There isn’t necessarily food to bring from home, nor money to pay for things purchased at school.

My husband is a teacher and keeps snacks in his room for kids who didn’t get anything to eat that day.

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