The economics of free lunch
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When Kathy Alexander started managing a lunch program at a Vermont school with 200 children in the late 1990s, she was shocked by how much the cafeteria felt like a business.
Her staff spent significant amounts of time on paperwork to track students’ incomes and collected money from kids at a cash register. They faced grueling decisions over whether they should raise prices and calculated the debts of families who barely missed out on eligibility for discounted meals yet struggled to pay the full price.
“Within a year I said to myself, ‘This is insane.’ What is happening? Why do I have to run this business in this school?” Alexander says.
Decades later, the model for Alexander, who’s now the director of the food service cooperative in the Mt. Abraham United School District, has changed. Vermont is one of eight states providing universal free meals to public K-12 students rather than charging different price points based on income. In lieu of onerous administrative work, Alexander’s staff spends more time brainstorming how to maximize federal dollars to support the program and trying out new recipes for pulled pork flatbread with pineapple sauce and Vietnamese rice bowls.
She wants universal free lunch to “sweep the country.”
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When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden - Minnie Aumônier
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@wtg said in The economics of free lunch:
She wants universal free lunch to “sweep the country.”
I agree!
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Agreed!
One of the differences between Canadian and US schools is we don’t have cafeterias in elementary schools. Students bring their lunch. We do have a universal snack program in our school (and all I have worked at in my career, though that isn’t universal) and so all children can have a breakfast/morning snack. We also make sure that any child who doesn’t have a lunch for whatever reason gets enough to eat during the day. But it’s in the form of a healthy snack (usually some cheese or yogurt, a piece of fruit, and some crackers or a muffin or something similar) rather than a hot meal.
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@dolmansaxlil said in The economics of free lunch:
Students bring their lunch.
Are there significant disparities in what students bring for lunch?
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@ShiroKuro Absolutely. We will never let a child be hungry, but we also aren’t policing what parents send with their kiddos to eat. So depending on lots of factors, including the fact that there is no grocery store in the town where I work, some kiddos are definitely eating way healthier than others.
