Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

huffpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 918 posts

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#561

Post by Cthulhu_ »

pergadad wrote: post #543
fakedang wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we had the same system when I went to school in a (relatively low-income) expat (Indian) school in the Middle East. But nowhere was a child expected to leave the break hungry - I saw firsthand a teacher ruthlessly scolded by the grade supervisor (who was a GOAT all-round) because she found a student still eating after she had arrived at the class, and sent him to stand outside as punishment. Another time, a teac…

No one is starving in the netherlands. There's a difference between offering a canteen but charging for it with some able and some not able to pay, and a general expectation that all bring food from home. Many Dutch, German, etc companies will also not have canteens but rather people bring a sandwich or last night's leftovers from home. The standard warm meal is the evening meal.

> No one is starving in the netherlands.

This is inaccurate, nearly half a million people struggle to eat enough: https://www.rodekruis.nl/persberichten/450000-mensen-in-verb.... There's food banks, but there's a lot of shame associated with using them; despite that, ~200.000 people a year make use of them: https://voedselbankennederland.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/09....

Also read the book "Superschool" about what was one of the worst schools in one of the poorest areas of the Netherlands, where there were loads of kids going to school hungry, dirty, and without basics like a coat.

Sorry, your throwaway remark just rubbed me up the wrong way. The Netherlands is not the socialist utopia that some people make it out to be, we just have bike lanes, sorta-legal weed and superior bread / cheese.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#562

Post by brianmcc »

mlyle wrote: post #353
mtnGoat wrote: post #343

As someone who experienced this first hand growing up. I consider how someone feels about free school lunch, a basic test of their humanity. If you think kids should go hungry or be embarrassed at school because of their parents finances… we can’t be friends, nor acquaintances. IMHO, you are subhuman at that point and not worth my time. My dad believed that because he paid taxes he shouldn’t have to pay the school to…

I don't know what the correct answer is. The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. In your case, it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload. So as long as you're going to charge for lunches, you need to have some kind of enforcement mechanism. Embarrassing the kid ideally would not be part o…

Treat it as the common good and societal investment it actually is, and fund it from central taxation like plenty of other countries do. Problem solved!

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#563

Post by pc86 »

mtnGoat wrote: post #343

As someone who experienced this first hand growing up. I consider how someone feels about free school lunch, a basic test of their humanity. If you think kids should go hungry or be embarrassed at school because of their parents finances… we can’t be friends, nor acquaintances. IMHO, you are subhuman at that point and not worth my time. My dad believed that because he paid taxes he shouldn’t have to pay the school to…

I think every child should get a hot, nutritious breakfast and lunch at school at taxpayer expense. But I'm also [edit] s/smart/reasonable enough to know that people who disagree with that aren't "subhuman."

There is no "basic test of humanity" and pretending their is is tribalistic bullshit so you can feel superior to other people who disagree with you.

It's digusting.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#564

Post by switch007 »

camgunz wrote: post #489
switch007 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every story about it being difficult to claim, there are plenty about people who haven't worked for 20 years who have received over £400,000 in welfare, who could have worked, because they learnt the game. The two sides have to move beyond these talking points if any useful discussion is to be had.

> For every story about it being difficult to claim, there are plenty about people who haven't worked for 20 years who have received over £400,000 in welfare This is perfectly accurate: the stories you hear make these issues out to be equal, when in fact they're anything but. Study after study shows that work requirements (the policy you're implicitly advocating for here) do not work: https://www.cbpp.org/research/po…

FWIW I do more than "hear" about these "stories". My figures weren't just made up. Personal experience but I'm not saying more than that

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#565

Post by vharuck »

bombcar wrote: post #106
rpcope1 wrote: post #82

Surely it can't be that expensive to just provide every child living in our country that so desires/needs it three decent meals a day, regardless of their situation? That one has always confused me, if our country is actually prosperous and powerful, that something as simple as that seems like a given that would be embarrassing not to provide.

Let's assume (bad assumption, but it should be good enough for the math) that a Happy Meal™®© is a decent meal. It costs about $6 around here, so let's say without toy it's $5. https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp says there are 71 million kids. $466 billion a year. Ok, ok, that is maybe too high. Let's assume a wonderful world where you can produce a meal for a dollar (less than the local scho…

If a school lunch is served for free, then parents who would have bought that lunch now get to keep the money. If we would raise taxes to fund these programs, it's possible the majority of people could actually save money.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#566

Post by amelius »

homebrewer wrote: post #550
amelius wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have deleted this comment because this discussion is going nowhere.

He's absolutely right. As someone whose society suffered very heavy losses from the Nazis, this is the first thing that came to my mind when I read the root comment. It's like posting swastikas online and then dismissing concerned replies because "it's a Buddhist sign, what are you on about?"

Except in this case the victims (the hungry children) are not the ones being labeled that. Also the word subhuman is in the dictionary (I checked Webster's) with zero reference to the war.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#567

Post by vidarh »

sneak wrote: post #545
askonomm wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wild to me. In Estonia school lunches are free for everyone, paid by the taxpayer. Doesn't matter if you are poor or wealthy, everybody gets the same food.

[flagged]

The effect of what you argue for would be 1) to make innocent children who have no control over whether or not their parents are too poor to fund education for their children suffer, and 2) to seriously negatively affect society as a whole by reducing the education-level of the public.

Society needs children to remain functioning and stable as people age and can't sustain themselves, and so from even a purely selfish angle, funding the welbeing of children and ensuring that having more children is viable to ensure an ongoing supply of labour to keep society functioning is the rational choice.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#568

Post by acdha »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #554
mettamage wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. In the Netherlands we packed our lunches or we cycled home to eat lunch with our parents and then cycled back to school. Lunch was one of the most favorite times of my day. A break from school during school hours. What a treat!

Yeah this is the part I don't understand; if a family can't afford a school lunch, can they afford a packed lunch at least? The concept of a school even having the facilities for a full lunch only became a thing in tertiary education for me, before that it was at best a hot snack or some soup. But this is Dutch 90's privilege to a point, elementary school was in cycling range, we had an hour and a half of lunch break…

> if a family can't afford a school lunch, can they afford a packed lunch at least?

More can, but American poverty is harsh for people who haven’t seen it. There are kids who don’t have stable living conditions (my wife has had students who rarely sleep under the same roof two nights in a row, one school in the district had a homelessness rate around 40%), or who might not have access to a refrigerator or rodent-proof storage, or who have abusive/mentally ill parents who don’t give them enough food, withhold it as a punishment, or think that enough Jesus will cure an allergy or other medical condition which means they can’t eat some things, etc. Social services may eventually catch up to this at some point but they’re chronically underfunded even in blue states and that can take a good chunk of someone’s childhood.

At this point, we have over a century of studies concluding that one of the easiest ways to improve education is to make sure kids aren’t hungry and the cost of doing so is cheaper than almost anything else (free glasses probably win there) so, like OP, I basically treat this as a litmus test for human decency.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#569

Post by vidarh »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #478
framapotari wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm in favor of free school lunches for kids. But I'm very annoyed with the strawmanning in this thread. For example, it seems like a strawman to say that people who are against free school lunches "want kids to go hungry". Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state. If parents are responsible then the children of the parents who can't or won't provide will go hungry. That is a…

Look into the expression "perverse incentive". Maybe he doesn't want people so thoughtless they'd make children without being able to feed them to do so? Also, too many Americans blindly praising socialism without knowing its consequences in the deep end. It's not all rainbows and butterflies.

Pray tell what horrible consequences you expect from feeding children to ensure they don't go hungry.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#570

Post by mystraline »

permo-w wrote: post #530
osrec wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

this is ridiculous. I'm a socialist and I believe that people should have far more of life's necessities provided to them by the state; I think supermarkets should be nationalised; I think water and electricity should be free up to a limit. on the other hand, this "people disagree with me about something sensitive so they're unevolved and/or subhuman" lark is childish as fuck and completely hypocritical people think…

No, there, at least in the USA, a large amount of very dumb people. They also tend to be quite sadistic as well, thinking 'those people' deserve the sadism and torment.

This percolates through our whole society, one case of which is this scholastic food 'debt'.

And also, during some of Biden's years, there was a few years of free school lunches. And was also summarily cancelled. Even democrats have this pervasive 'those people don't deserve X'.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/free-school-lunches-set...

Post reply on HN