This is how your beloved government drones combat childhood obesity. They take your tax dollars and buy breakfast and lunch for kids whose families can afford to feed them. The government should not be in the business of feeding kids. Public schools have one job and one job only. Educate children and instill a curiosity and desire to learn. They have failed miserably, so they turn to social engineering and instilling an entitlement mentality in parents and children. They have used the excuse of hungry children not being prepared to learn as the reason for free lunches for the “poor”. I thought food stamps were supposed to provide money to feed the poor.
Now they have “expanded” their entitlement program to all kids. If you live in Pottstown and make $150,000 per year, your kid still gets fed by you the taxpayer. The rational from the government drones is that they are already feeding two thirds of the kids, so what’s the big deal feeding the other third. It’s only fair. They are just spending your tax dollars. And to those who contend it isn’t much, they evidently didn’t pay attention in math class. Paying $3.05 for the 840 kids who don’t need to be fed totals over $400,000 per year. That is your money.
This is your government in action. Multiply this clusterfuck policy by thousands and you understand why they run $700 billion annual deficits and have accumulated $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities. There are going to be a lot of unhappy free shitters when this fantasy comes to a tragic ending.
Free meals for all Pottstown school students coming in Sept.
POTTSTOWN — There really is such a thing as a free lunch — and free breakfast, too.
The federal government recently approved the Pottstown School District’s application to provide free breakfasts and lunches to every student in the district starting with the 2014-15 school year.
“We’re pleased to announced that every one of our students will now have the opportunity to have a nutritious breakfast and lunch to enable them to perform at the highest academic level,” said John Armato, the district’s director of community relations.
The decision comes in the wake of the March school board vote to apply for the free program given the high rate of poverty in Pottstown, as illustrated by the fact that Pottstown as many as 2,270 of the district 3,110 students qualify for the federally funded free-and-reduced-lunch program.
On Monday, building principals began alerting parents to the change with emails alerting them that “all students are automatically eligible to participate for both meals as listed on the monthly menu. No applications are required.”
Leroy Merkel, director of food services for the district, said the district will receive a reimbursement from the government for 95 percent of the cost of the lunches.
The district will get reimbursed at a price of $3.05 per meal.
“The remaining 5 percent of the cost will be covered by the cost of the a la carte food,” he said.
Merkel explained that the free lunches apply to “the meal as menued. So if a student just wants a piece of pizza, or a water or a soft pretzel — and that happens mostly at the secondary level — then they have to pay for that and that should more than cover the remaining costs,” he said.
The meals on the menu comply with the new federal regulations to make school means more nutritious.
The 2010 re-authorization of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act also significantly tightened the nutritional requirements for the school lunches, Merkel said.
“For example, the K-8 lunch menu has to be between 600 and 650 calories and it has minimums and maximums for grains and proteins as well,” Merkel said.
“It’s all aimed at combating childhood obesity,” said Merkel.
The district has been preparing for the change, Merkel said, particularly given that in the seven or eight states where this program was piloted, schools reported seeing a 25 percent increase in students coming in for breakfast and a 13 percent increase of those getting lunch.
“Our numbers were already on the high side already, so I would guess we’re going to see an increase of between 8-to-10 percent,” he said.
Even with that increase, the district is prepared for the start of the program at the start of school, on Sept. 2, Merkel said.
“We’re ready to go,” he said.
And the children grow up dependent on government benevolence growing the FSA and the progressive movement destroying any ideas of self reliance or free thought.
Brilliant.
1) $3.05 per meal. I really don’t care about economies of scale and all that ….. the quality of that food must be real crap
2) 600-650 calories for an 8th grader? Might be fine for the girls. But for fast growing boys that ain’t jack-shit. I would have starved.
Stuck – that is a pitiful amount for a growing boy.
“Shit is fucked up and bullshit.”
I hate the government for a million reasons. This is reason one million and one.
They fail at education, so the will instead feed them GMO HFCS bullshit to make Mooshell proud.
The parasite grows ever fatter on the blood of productive people.
Let me out of here! The insane are running the asylum!
Somebody heeelllp meeee…….
humans on the way to becoming farm animals
eradicate the competitive spirit
make them dependent on government for food
insert bank chip
cops desensitizing humans to arbitrary killing
to each according to their needs
from each according to their capacity
Chicken nuggets? Chicken fucking nuggets? This is what they’re feeding kids to combat obesity? They’re going to put The Onion out of business.
The utter stupidity of the knuckleheads administering these programs defies belief. The government can’t educate, so it propagandizes. It can’t solve poverty, because it is its cause. It can’t defeat obesity when its “solutions” are the source of the pathetic health of our youth (and our adults).
It’s spending money it doesn’t have solving problems it created using unworkable programs it has no authority to administer.
Can we please get the desperately needed dollar crisis this country so richly deserves? It will stop in its tracks the central planning madness that pervades our institutions.
Sorry. That last anonymous was me. Computer problems…
Breakfast, lunch… What about dinner? If you don’t give them dinner they won’t be able to do their homework. If we can send a man to the moon we can afford to buy breakfast, lunch and dinner for every kid in America. And dessert. And snacks.
You’re on to something, Iska. Why stop at meals? Shouldn’t we have licensed psychologists and other bureaucrats managing bedtime stories? Curfews? Timeouts?
If we can send men to the moon, surely we can make sure infants have proper diaper changes, breast feedings, and the appropriate toys in their Christmas stockings.
Maybe we can have the government dictate what outfits children wear, what games they can play, what thoughts they can have.
If they can do it for children, why not teenagers? 20-somethings? Adults? Life would be so much better if only we had even bigger government micro-managing every conceivable aspect of our lives.
I think you are looking at this in the wrong way.
This is , IMO, just a way to subsidize big box grocers.
I know a little bit about this:
So free lunches came about because too many parents were sending their kids to school on empty stomachs and with lunches that scandalized teachers. Hungry, the kids couldn’t learn well. School districts pleaded poverty so the Feds provided funding. Right now, nearly every school district in the county believes they should contribute $0 to school meals. Result: cheapest commodity food merely reheated in “kitchens”.
I’m not particularly adverse to schools providing meals (esp. given 2 working parents or single parents), but the way we’re doing it is deeply flawed. You can completely turn around kids’ learning, medical issues and behavioral problems with the right food. (I’m frightened to think what many parents pack in a lunch–seriously it’s probably 2 steps down from what the school cafeteria serves. Parents have turned their kids into sugar addicts and their sugary lunch feeds the addiction.)
There’s a whole movement of people trying to change the school lunch program. There are hordes of conferences, meetings with school officials (as if anyone who works for the schools doesn’t know the problem of school meals), changing meals district-wide, etc. Their methods will take forever. As long as school districts think the Feds are going to pay even 1 cent per meal, nothing will change.
In an ideal situation, moms of students at the schools would work the school kitchens, preparing everything from scratch. All plant items would be grown around the school (perhaps in greenhouses) and picked that am for maximum nutrient density. Say goodbye to commodity items because if ain’t grown around the school–largely employing moms on welfare in return for their checks + a stipend–it ain’t served. Animal items (most never frozen) might have to come from outside town depending if it doesn’t work to raise them directly around the school. If you remove the cheap grains and sugars, you add even more animal items (esp. animal fats), something kids need. Desert is fruit. Real prices on meals–figure lunch around $10, a figure many parents would be happy to pay in return for not having to pack a lunch. Subsidize the poor. The point is to serve up something good, and put the district’s money to use eliminating as many problems as possible with the same dollar. We will get there, but it will start with the private schools first and filter it’s way down.
Or take it further (and this would probably start in a small town under 1,000 people): add 1-2 hours to the school day. EVERYONE from the kindergardener to the principal eats for free in return for their labor growing and preparing the meals. Sell some excess–and there will be plenty–to cover costs and allow kids to work extra for surplus food. Imagine the smile on a struggling single mother’s face when her 10 year old daughter comes home with 3 pounds of grass fed ground beef in return for her 3 extra hours at school that day (+ she pays nothing for the free child care). Even if there was no need for the extra hours and you simply gave the surplus food away to the poor, the reduction of medical costs that gov. pays would be substantial. We know how to do this, and we’ve done it before. We simply have to get past the narrative that we Americans are so f….ing exceptional that we’re above growing and preparing our own food.
Or we learn to live with the slow slog downward.
Having spent a week at Killington,Vt I ate breakfast a few times at Mcdonalds down on rt 4 in Rutland .
Across the street from McDonalds is Rutland high School. I could not help notice the sign for freee food for children outside the high school and the parking lot seemed to have many cars in it being the summertime and no school in session.
I wonder in areas where there isn’t many jobs and the price of gas has risen so much as we’ll as food , how common is this?
I see this as a real world sign of what is to come.
You guys don’t really think all those kids are really in need of free food, do you? A bowl of oatmeal costs about a dime. Two salami sandwiches and an apple costs about $1.25, including the sandwich bags. Have kids? Buy your own fucking sandwiches. Like Admin says, I thought that’s what the food stamps were for.
@Stucky, you’ve got that right, active boys stomachs are like blast furnaces – they just keep shoveling it in.
@Mike, I love how you apply a little common sense and out of the box thinking to the “problem” of feeding our kids. Shame that I know not of ONE gubment program that operates with common sense and out of the box thinking.
Your plan would have every state/local/public union member in the country freaking out! Dominos, Eggo and Weight Watchers would see massive hits to their sales/bottom lines.
In short, the money that be would NEVER allow your solutions.
Jamie Oliver, a chef from the UK, attempted to show a school (I believe it was in Virginia), that real food could be inexpensive, healthy and tasty. The school admin, “chefs” and teachers, ACTIVELY worked to convince the kids they would not like the food. It worked, Oliver slunk away, I assume, to go back and find some people with brain cells. He sure as hell couldn’t find them here.
Kids today are not fat because of eating pizza at school once a week, or chicken nuggets, or whole-fat milk (illegal now, brilliant, F*U* Mooshell), or even chocolate pudding and chips.
One small meal a day, in the middle of an intensively active day where a student’s mind and body is kept hopping, will NEVER make the kids fat. Never.
They fed us kids absolute, high-carb, cheap to provide, crap food, and yet less than 1 out of 300 in my school was fat.
This country is the very best at solving problems that don’t exist with methods that won’t work.
I’m with @taxslave, nothing the total collapse of our money won’t solve. THEN we will need the gubment to feed our children and the silence will be deafening.
What caught my attention was the amount of packaging. Everything they are eating comes in a disposable container and they are using plastic utensils. Why can’t they drink their milk from washable, reusable glasses and eat from washable, reusable plates, using washable, reusable silverware?
@pirate Jo, because most likely their libtard buddy has the contract and the self dealing creates problems like waste that their other libtard connection has a contract based on graft as well.
@PJ, that is a great observation.
Plastic packaging that is created from PETROchemicals, or, oil.
What you felt while looking at the pic is the same thing I’ve always felt when watching a symposium on “global warming.”
The fat bastards fly private planes around the world to talk about. Then they sit in massive conference centers with PLASTIC bottles on EVERY table, talking about taxing us little people to “save the planet.”
And, of course, the likes of Al Gore building a 12,000 foot mansion, all while crying about how us little families living in 1000 sq foot ranches are the problem.
Stupidity, hubris, hypocrisy. That should be our new motto.
Out our way the free breakfast and lunch program at the schools does not stop when school lets out for the summer, it continues year round, you just need to show up. It obviously tapers off in the summer because the buses are not running, but if you show up you get fed. Simple as that, eat all the processed prepackaged crap you want.
i apologize to all the volks who are responding to the post. i am in the beer. yet thru the haze i learned something of worth. satire and parody is a lost art, i have pissed off several people off as i praised dear leader and i wish to join the party and requested that the nsa leave me be, so sorry i went astray, who can complain about a free lunch, its a right to eat