Hacker News Reader

Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

The kids aren't already there during the summer. As the GP pointed out.

In the US there is a summer lunch program at participating schools. And kid any day can come get a free lunch, they just pick it up. Makes sure that kids get food in the summer.

So… why delivery and why a list?

Yes, all kids will be able to make it back to the school easily...

In the US the school bus drops off food at the bus stops.

Neither are the teachers. This is why having the teachers act as a social security service is a poor idea.

This may shock you, but the teachers aren't the ones delivering the food!

Nevertheless, the organisation of services to provide free food to selected kids at home and at school requires a database to record which kids. Such a database is also accessible to schools for obvious reasons.

If you have the very HN-y opinion that being on a database is so bad it would be better if the kids stayed hungry that's fine, but please at least make a token attempt to understand a system before dismissing it.

> If you have the very HN-y opinion that being on a database is so bad it would be better if the kids stayed hungry that's fine, but please at least make a token attempt to understand a system before dismissing it.

Quite the opposite - my view is that if someone is hungry, then they should be provided food as a basic function of human society. To be honest, I've never heard of this food delivery system from UK schools and I thought that the issue was mainly handled (poorly in my view) by having Food Banks for starving families.

Can you point me to some information on this UK scheme please?

The food delivery system is, frankly a bit of a patchwork rather than a national scheme now: there was a national scheme introduced during the pandemic to supply vouchers to kids that would otherwise have received school meals during school closures, and packed lunches to self isolating kids, a lot of campaigns to extend that to regular school holidays spearheaded by the unlikely figure of a professional footballer, and now a patchwork of schemes run by many local authorities covering everything from community organised lunch clubs to vouchers to packed lunch deliveries

If you want to argue it sounds like a mess and would be better as a broad social security scheme I'm not going to disagree (though limiting numbers on it does save governments money...), but either way, it's going to need names and addresses on a database to make it work.

Ah yes, Marcus Rashford.

Not having kids myself, I didn't realise that teachers were so involved in providing food. I'd definitely go along with delegating food provision to a different group other than teachers (dinner ladies?). I suppose my concern is tying together multiple data sources when it should not be necessary to look at police records when deciding to give out food vouchers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com