I might be misunderstanding the problem but in Australia the parents send the kids to school with packed lunches proportional to the household income… fancy lunches for rich kids, and rice or bread for poor kids.
I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
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Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#252I might be misunderstanding the problem but in Australia the parents send the kids to school with packed lunches proportional to the household income… fancy lunches for rich kids, and rice or bread for poor kids.
Or proportional to the household eating habits. I'm definitely in the upper income bracket of my son's state primary school and he brings a sandwich and a piece of fruit like every other kid because it's a sensible amount of food for a small child.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#253I feel like this has already been discussed before one million times more than the simplicity of the issue should require. Any income etc based coupon system is inefficient and automatically excludes a big portion of children that such measures are supposed to be for, eg because a lot of them come from families that are too dysfunctional to apply for those, ignorant of them due to language and other barriers, or beca…
"it is a total moral bankruptcy for a society to have their children starve for their parents dysfunction." Sounds like child services should take those children then? If they can't apply for the lunches, then surely they aren't getting food at home, nor the proper medical care.
Lose your job, lose your children. Great policy ideas from the thoughtful HN crowd, as always.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
2010s and 2020s are the two different decades. I found $23,884 expenditure per child in 2014-2015, which is when the $4.30 school lunch cost is from. With 180 instructional days, lunch would be $4.30/day x 180day/year / $23884/year = 3.2%. > I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having…
I see the problem is I used your $5M number which is NYC, and divided by the state budget. However, I don’t think the $5M number is referring to the total cost of providing lunch, and that’s what you’re comparing it to in your calculation. Apples, oranges. Because the schools are already providing free and subsidized lunches, the additional cost isn’t that much and I’m not off by a factor of 150. I am wrong, but not…
I was replying to an “it pays for itself” comment and looking for the most favorable possible numbers for the most limited incremental change to the program, to show that even then, it doesn’t pay for itself. That’s where the $5M comes from—it’s the incremental cost, to the city, of providing free lunches to an additional 35,000 elementary school students, after the federal government reimburses $3.24 per lunch, using data from 2015.
I think the comment I was replying to believed that some big chunk of the cost was due figuring out which students deserve free lunches or not. That’s untrue.
The lunch program is substantial and can’t really be hidden by burying it in some much larger budget.
I get the argument “this is valuable, we should do this” but I don’t buy the argument “this cost is small”.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#255On the off chance you're interested in school lunches I highly recommend watching videos of Japanese school lunches on YouTube. There's a bunch out there now and if you were raised in the American system it will probably blow your mind. The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children are active participants in serving and cleaning up is just crazy. When I encountered it for…
> The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children
Excellent garden path sentence.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
During COVID, school lunch was free, and most school served free bag lunches over the summer too. That ended in June 2022. Congress could've kept it going for a pittance, but alas...
This is a problem. If you roll out a program to deal with an extraordinary circumstance, some people think it should go on forever even when the extraordinary circumstance is over. They think it should be a welfare benefit forever. Next pandemic, no government programs. None. We've seen how it goes. No benefits next time. People just try to turn it into eternal government welfare programs. I don't want eternal govern…
>to deal with temporary problems
Hungry children are not a temporary problem, and letting them go hungry is only going to cause further problems down the line.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without kids living and being born and learning and becoming productive members of society your lifestyle would not exist and current economic models would collapse in a handful of years. You are shooting everyone including yourself in the foot because you personally don't need to walk places.
"and current economic models would collapse in a handful of years." It's possible that's not a bad thing considering they're built on excessive consumption and an ever expanding population.
I would agree that current models are crap, but what kind of alternative would actually be viable with dumber, less healthy, and a shrinking population? We could do with one of them, maybe two if we are just scraping by for time, but all three? That is a one way ticket to a collapse that wouldn't be overcome for many generations.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#258I might be misunderstanding the problem but in Australia the parents send the kids to school with packed lunches proportional to the household income… fancy lunches for rich kids, and rice or bread for poor kids.
There is a cafeteria at the school where students can purchase lunch, if they want to purchase a lunch but don't have any cash on hand they can use credit, if they hit their cap and want to purchase lunch on yet more credit they are given alternative meals or nothing. There is no "free lunch".
~75% of k-12 students bring lunch from home. If you are on assistance then your lunch is prepaid. Generally the food is so hilariously bad that most won't pay for it, but there are good schools here and there. 9-12 students generally are allowed to leave campus during lunch hours.
There may also be an additional "a la carte" system where you can buy single items either if you have extra money in your account or have cash on hand, but not on credit. Like a canteen.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#259New York State just passed universal free lunch and breakfast for public school students. Of all the things that we spend our tax dollars on, this feels like a no brainer. Making sure children are fed should be at the top of the list.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#260Is the overhead in deciding who gets free lunch and who doesn't and then managing the debt really saving more money than just giving all public school kids free lunches with no strings attached?
I feel like there's the administrative overhead, but also every child having food when they are learning is sure to be a profound positive externality. The only outcome of having kids to go to school hungry or receive substandard education is keeping the poorer classes of society "in their place." This is very gross.
To make it worse, I believe that there have been incidences where people have tried to do similar (pay off school lunch debt) and the School District has refused, citing reasons from "processing overhead" to "privacy".