Schools Should Provide A Free Lunch For All Students

You may already have heard about this. It seems that an elementary school cafeteria worker has been terminated from her job because she gave a free lunch to a first grader that had no money or lunch. The cafeteria worker, Della Curry, admitted her "crime" saying:

“I had a first grader in front of me, crying, because she doesn’t have enough money for lunch. Yes, I gave her lunch.”

I don't know about you, but I don't think she should have been fired. When did feeding hungry children become a bad thing in our society?

Now some of you may be thinking that giving that first-grader a free lunch was stealing from the school district. I say that's a load (of what comes out of the south end of a north-bound bull). She gave the child some food that would otherwise have been thrown away after the lunch period was over. If we are so worried about the "stealing" of food about to be thrown away that we would refuse to feed a hungry child, what does that say about our society? It's certainly not the christian thing, or even the human thing, to do.

Personally, I think the schools (at least in elementary school) should provide a free and nutritious lunch to all students -- regardless of their financial situation. The government requires students to attend school, and since we require them to be there, we should feed them. It's just a fact that a hungry child doesn't do as well in school as one who is not -- and it's to all our advantage that every child does well in school (and gets the best education we can give them). And providing all children with the same free lunch would accomplish something else -- it would remove the stigma that sometimes comes with a poor child getting a free lunch.

Some of you may want to claim at this point that the school district cannot afford to provide a free lunch to all students. Again, I call bull-crap. Any school that can provide athletic stadiums, athletic teams and other extracurricular activities, pay coaches an exorbitant salary, buy standardized testing, and other things that have little to do with really educating a student, then they can afford to feed the children they are trying to educate.

It's stories like this cafeteria worker being fired for feeding tiny children that show us just how sick our society has become. We should be better than that.

(The image above is from the website emporium.schoolnutrition.org.)