Chapter Three – The Broken Body of Our Education System – Hurry Up And Eat A Little

Food. It does a body good. If it’s good food. If you get enough of it. If you get a chance to eat it.

It starts small, with little inconsistencies. For instance, on one nacho day, the kids get plenty of cheese. On the next, they get a little sprinkle of cheese but can have a bit more if they throw in an extra quarter. A child at an elementary school gets four cheese sticks with his meal, while a child at the junior high gets two. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought these meals were supposed to be nutritionally balanced. How can that be when there are different portion sizes from meal to meal? And speaking of portion sizes, I have talked to at least a half dozen parents who say their kids either go through the day hungry or purchase extra portions so they can feel full. I’m no mathematician, but by my calculations, when adding the cost of extra portions to a student meal, an adult meal costs less for the same amount of food. Sounds a little sour to me.

In addition, at the junior high, kids are cutting in line at lunch not only because it’s the only way that they can eat in time not to be tardy for their next class, but also because if they wait at the end of the line they probably won’t have any selection left by the time they make it to the front. Is it too much to ask that our kids, first or last in line, get the same selection as everyone else, and enough food so their stomachs aren’t rumbling through the rest of the day? Is it too much to ask that our kids be given enough time to eat their food without having to stuff it down their gullet? I was taught that it wasn’t healthy to eat like that, so why is it part of the required curriculum at our schools?

Furthermore, I have to ask who designed this new computer system that replaces the old lunch tickets? It eliminates the need for kids to keep track of a bunch of paper tickets, and gives parents the ability to track account balances. A great idea, but obviously a botched execution. It would have been so much easier if they added family accounts so parents who have two or more children wouldn’t have to write multiple checks every payday. And how about allowing parents to refill the accounts from home with an online payments? I don’t know about you, but in this day of identity theft, I’m not so sure I want my children walking around in school with signed personal checks in their pockets.

Finally, if a student forgets his ID card, he gets to stand in a line against the wall until everyone else is done (how humiliating), and then wait while the staff reboots the computer so they can enter his ID number manually. Why does it have to be rebooted? I know that Powerschool is Macintosh based software, but this thing sounds like a Microsoft Beta release.

I understand that the kids have some responsibility in these matters, but the school doesn’t get to just pass it all off on them. It is the school’s responsibility to make sure our kids are provided a nutritionally sound meal, and are given a reasonable amount of time to consume it. It can be done with better planning, better training, and a better choice of equipment.

So let me break this down and simplify it. Serve good food. Serve enough food. Serve it fast. Make payment simple. If fast food places can do it with teenaged minimum wage employees, our school system should be able to handle it. Too much to ask?

In the next installment, I’ll be begin my study of teachers. Lord help me.

Wisdom