|
|
|
|
|
|
by Cthulhu_
414 days ago
|
|
|
Yeah this is the part I don't understand; if a family can't afford a school lunch, can they afford a packed lunch at least? The concept of a school even having the facilities for a full lunch only became a thing in tertiary education for me, before that it was at best a hot snack or some soup. But this is Dutch 90's privilege to a point, elementary school was in cycling range, we had an hour and a half of lunch break, and I had a stay at home parent. Secondary school was only a few hundred meters further away than elementary school. Tertiary was in the next town over, 20 minute bike ride. Either way, it made no economic sense to pay for lunch, so for most of it I had some sandwiches, this was the norm for most people. I'm nearly 40 now and still (should) bring a packed lunch to the office, because going out for lunch costs €10,- easily. If I went to the office every day like in the Before Times, that'd be around €200,- a month or €2400 a year, which is A Lot. |
|
|
More can, but American poverty is harsh for people who haven’t seen it. There are kids who don’t have stable living conditions (my wife has had students who rarely sleep under the same roof two nights in a row, one school in the district had a homelessness rate around 40%), or who might not have access to a refrigerator or rodent-proof storage, or who have abusive/mentally ill parents who don’t give them enough food, withhold it as a punishment, or think that enough Jesus will cure an allergy or other medical condition which means they can’t eat some things, etc. Social services may eventually catch up to this at some point but they’re chronically underfunded even in blue states and that can take a good chunk of someone’s childhood.
At this point, we have over a century of studies concluding that one of the easiest ways to improve education is to make sure kids aren’t hungry and the cost of doing so is cheaper than almost anything else (free glasses probably win there) so, like OP, I basically treat this as a litmus test for human decency.