RE: Lunch Programs are racist? Let's look closer shall we?
I like long comments. My problem with the articles and the people who were writing them was that they tried to make it about racism when there was no evidence of any of that... they just assumed (or perhaps just lied about) it because that gets people all worked up.
I don't think that any school kid should not get fed but if a situation arises where a family is not paying for the lunches claiming they don't have money, but somehow manages to have money for all the elective fun stuff, is there not at least a chance that there is some sort of intentional abuse that is going on?
It reminds me of a friend that owed me a couple of thousand dollars, and for years didn't pay me back.. always claiming that he had no money but he didn't realize i was FB friends with his wife and I actually saw the posts and pics of the elaborate vacations they were going on.
For me the main thing that really caught my eye was the media being blatantly dishonest (big surprise) and people who don't even read the articles just take the headline and run with it.
Yeah, like I said, it is really hard. Many of those people do get government assistance which they spend on frivolous things. Like I said though, if they would just fill out the papers their kid could get free lunch every day. The problem is they have to list the income of everyone living in the house, so that live in girlfriend/boyfriend, their kids grandparents and the seven other people living in the house need to be recorded to. We actually have a mass calling system for things like snow days and stuff like that. They wanted me to set it up to start calling parents when they have a lunch balance and I dug my heels in and said no. I told them if you want to guarantee the parent never answers another call from the school again, go ahead and do it, but I don't want to facilitate that.