The use of schools as local freebie feedbags is growing and includes parents who just show up to be fed, as happens in hispanic Santa Ana, California.
DC Students Receive Dinner at School, Fox News DC, October 19, 2010Isn’t that cheerful? The program is ”federally funded” so someone else is paying for it. Unsurprisingly, the energetic do-gooders spending other people’s money want to expand it to all 50 states.WASHINGTON — Getting kids to eat three healthy meals a day can be a challenge, especially if money is tight. But D.C. Public Schools have found a way to take some of that burden off parents. They are now serving dinner at school.
On the menu are things like salmon salad, a whole grain roll, orange juice, one percent milk and a corn and pepper relish.
”With positive feedback, the kids will enjoy the food,” Chef Edward Kwitowski said.
He is in charge of whipping up healthy dinners for D.C. school kids as part of this new program to provide three healthy meals a day at school.
”Our program is from scratch cooking with local produce,” said Kwitowski. ”And definitely low fat cooking.”
It’s a far cry from the muffin or bagel and juice kids used to get in the after school program, which was often was the last food some would eat until the next day at school. ——”It’s good and it’s healthy,” fourth grader Emanuel Gross said. ”So I can stay on task.”
D.C. joins 13 states which serve three meals a day at school — and to the tune of $5.7 million. Officials here have embraced the program because they realize healthy, well-fed kids learn better.
”We’re reaching 10,000 kids a day at 99 of our 120 schools,” said Anthony Tata, Chief Operating Officer of D.C. Public Schools.
That’s about 25 percent of the student population. And another big benefit of the after school dinners are that more kids are enrolling in after school programs where they can get some academic help as well.
So the dinners are really serving three purposes – fighting hunger, obesity and offering help with classwork too.
And the best news of all is this is a federally-funded program.
”We’re reimbursed on a per meal basis,” Tata said. ”We can already see the good it’s doing for our kids.”
The excuse for increased government meddling in families is better nutrition. And it is certainly true that childhood obesity is a bad problem that is visible in the nation’s public spaces. One now can frequently observe grotesquely blobby kids, with shapes that were not seen a couple decades ago.
However, it is the responsibility of the family to feed their kids, not the all-powerful nanny state on the backs of taxpayers. Plus, if kids don’t have a single meal with other family members, what contact do they have? School feeding imprints institutionalization.
And with such generous government help, why would prospective parents feel the need for accountability? In the case of illegal aliens, US-born anchor babies are quite literally meal tickets and keys to the kingdom. Add the hispanic fondness for bunches of babies and the result can be enormous, like the 10-kid dysfunctional family described by Sam Quinones in 6 + 4 = 1 Tenuous Existence.
Here’s the video version of the story:
