• doingthestuff@lemmy.world
    81·
    1 month ago

    My wife has been a school kitchen manager for a number of years. Lunch debt is such bullshit. We funded free school meals for all students for a year during covid and it cost $10 billion. We could have funded school lunches for many years just with what we’ve sent to the Ukraine. We don’t have it because we have no way to influence the people we elect to do the things we value. It is clearly not something our elected representatives value.

    • WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
      72·
      1 month ago

      While I’m definitely in favour of funding school lunches, and agree it should be trivial to find that in the budget, you need to understand that kids can’t eat the aging military equipment that’s being sent to help Ukraine defend themselves, crippling a hostile dictatorship with equipment that would otherwise mostly be scrapped.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    I wanna know how the schools I went to through various grades sucked shit in terms of facilities and teaching materials, but still managed to have decent meals for breakfast and lunch. I actually have been craving a few things I remember from school lunches the past few days…

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 month ago

      Living in a deep blue state growing up, our food wasn’t half-bad. Might be because we don’t have an education system in America, we have 50 education systems.

      • UraniumBlazer@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        1 month ago

        It’s kinda even more than that for u guys, no? Isn’t the education system of a school decided by the school district?

        • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 month ago

          Partially. States retain a lot of control over budget and education standards, but a lot of district-level decisions can end up influential with regards to the day-to-day functioning of a school. In my home state, though, for example, school lunches had to meet strict state guidelines, and the district had no say over that.

  • Perry@lemy.lol
    12·
    1 month ago

    Don’t kids get free breakfast and lunch in US schools? Asking because all government funded schools do that in the country I live, and there are 1,186,570 government funded schools as of 2018 data.

    • chaogomu@lemmy.world
      9·
      1 month ago

      No, most schools don’t do breakfast, and almost all of them charge for food.

      Any attempt to actually feed children is treated as a direct attack on Freedom or some shit.

      Hell, the FBI only started to care about the Black Panthers when they started feeding kids.

      It sucks ass.

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
      4·
      1 month ago

      Not always. There’s usually some kind of reduced price or free program for low income households. Edit: this is a federally administrated program so the free/reduced costs for low income households should apply to all schools.

      And I feel like it’s somewhat more common to have just free lunch for all compared to th past? (But most schools stay paid…) My school district switched to free meals for everyone my 2nd year of highschool. But that’s all location dependant.

      Looks like California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Vermont all have free school meals across the board, which accounts for a bit more than 20% of the country. But this is a SUPER recent development, California was the first and that was only in 2022.