Posted on 05/30/2017 12:21:49 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Summertime,
and the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’
and the cotton is high
Oh your daddy’s rich
and your ma is good-lookin’
So hush, little baby,
don’t you cry.
— Lyrics to “Summertime,” sung by Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald knew a lot about the haves and have-nots. She grew up poor and at 17 had been homeless and hungry for a year before she was “discovered” at The Apollo in Harlem in 1934.
Think of the millions of hungry children in rich America today who might never be “discovered” or are kept from realizing their talents. And for them summertime is very hard with bouts of hunger.
On the last day of school they’ll leave behind more than teachers and friends. They lose access to the school breakfasts, lunches, and after-school snacks that help keep them healthy and ready to learn during the school year. For many children these are their best or only meals of the day.
The 100 percent federally funded Summer Food Service Program will once again this year be a food lifeline for millions of low-income hungry children during the long hot summer. Right now many community sponsors, including school districts, local government agencies, camps and private nonprofit organizations are working through their state agencies to be ready to serve healthy meals to millions of children this summer.
The Summer Food Service Program tries to meet the need and helps to deliver the dollars to pay for the basic nutrition every child needs every day. For communities that use it, the benefits are enormous. It not only feeds children but provides much needed summer jobs for youth and adults often in communities where jobs are scarce — including cafeteria workers, bus drivers and many others who enable children to stave off summer hunger.
The tragedy is too few of the children who receive school breakfasts or lunches get free meals in the summer. Many more go hungry. The Food Research & Action Center notes more than 20 million children received free or reduced-price school lunch during the 2014-2015 school year, but only 3.2 million of them — 1 in 6 — received meals during summer 2015.
No state comes close to reaching all its hungry children during the summer. In 2015 only nine states and the District of Columbia served summer meals to more than 20 percent of children who participated in free or reduced-priced lunch programs during the school year. Eleven states served summer meals to fewer than 1 in 10 of their low-income children.
But some good news is that state efforts are slowly growing: 29 states did better in summer 2015 than in summer 2014.
States and localities can and must do far more to stop summer hunger. It’s unconscionable that states and communities are leaving millions of dollars on the table that could be used to feed hungry children right now and create jobs supporting summer feeding programs in communities that desperately need them. No communities should be allowed to ignore these funds.
As Coretta Scott King once said: “I must remind you that starving a child is violence.”
The first step, of course, is to make sure federal, state and local summer nutrition programs remain a budget priority and do not lose ground or go backwards. When more than one million households with children have no income but benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps as I still call it), and there is talk of threats to even that critical piece of the safety net, every eligible community must find a way to ensure their children are fed.
Find out where the summer feeding sites are in your community. Check with other organizations in your community that provide summer activities for children to help them find ways to add meals. They may need a little help from local foundations or community donations to cover extra expenses like refrigerators or coolers. Smaller programs may be able to link to other food programs in their community to get meals to feed the children in their care.
If transportation to summer feeding sites is a problem for children, as it is in a number of states, mobile food vans may be an option with help from local bus or other transportation services.
Summer feeding programs could become the hub for other child-focused activities. Adding programs and services and keeping sites open longer could not only reduce summer hunger but help communities create some desperately-needed jobs and implement greatly needed quality out-of-school-time programs — a win-win.
Other communities are testing electronic benefit transfer cards to help families purchase extra food for children during the summer. We should be using the Summer Food Service Program as effectively as possible with the achievable goal of ending summer child hunger in every community.
There’s still time to do your part. The Children’s Defense Fund is proud that all of our CDF Freedom Schools sites will be serving meals this summer, some with Summer Food Service Program partnerships.
There is still time to start a site or to link other programs to existing sites. The USDA’s Summer Food Service Program’s website is a helpful resource and offers tips: In order for a site to exist in your community, a school, nonprofit organization or local government agency must be the program sponsor and be responsible for the administration of the program.
To begin mobilizing your community, contact the following people or groups, and tell them you want to help feed hungry children in the community this summer. Contact:
• The school principal
• Teachers
• The Parent Teachers Association
• The school food service manager
• School officials such as the school board or superintendent of schools
• The Mayor’s office
• Recreation and Parks Office County officials
• Elected officials.
As the USDA says: Volunteer! Our best Summer Food Service Program sites have organized, well-run activities that keep the interest of the children and teens coming back to the site day after day. Some of these activities include arts and crafts, tutoring, mentoring, drama, sports, computer training, music, gardening, reading programs, cooking or any other creative ideas you may have.
Many sites have enlisted local fire and police departments, local celebrities, local businesses and local political figures to make presentations to their SFSP sites.
The only limitation is your imagination. Please do your part to make this summer a time when living is easier for children by helping stamp out hunger.
***********
Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.
America ain't rich.
$20 Trillion in debt says otherwise.
So what do they buy with food stamps? Drugs?
Average food stamps per person is $127 per month.
During the school year many of these kids are on school breakfast and lunch programs...
As well as the family getting food stamps.
Also, don’t forget the EITC.
The maximum EITC with one qualifying child is $3,250, with two children, it is $5,372, and with three or more qualifying children, it is $6,044.
Abuse doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If children are being abused by not being fed, then there is also other abuse happening. Remove those children from the abusive home instead of covering up abuse with lunch programs that enrich NGOs.
It’s ironic how some people just never wanted to leave the plantation after all.
Yes. And 40’s, smokes, lottery scratchers, junk food, gas, etc.
The USA is too stretched financially to pay for the things she wants as well as the other ones you mention. We need our money to build a wall and do other things to keep terrorists out that murder children. It’s far better that they be hungry than dead. I say, let churches and other institutions that don’t have the security responsibilities that the Federal Goverment has feed these children if their parents can’t or won’t.
A LOT of people and organizations (churches, etc) would be happy to feed hungry kids. The government involvement will only end in abuse and thievery!
If all of these programs were replaced with simple “soup lines”, the country would appear to be in ten times worse condition than during the Great Depression.
Just sayin’...
Pretty Soon the Welfare families will get three meals a day at taxpayers expense.. What is the matter with PBJ sandwich and some milk in a thermos. The kids don’t like those school lunches any how.. I mean a bowl of Cheerios or Cornflakes in the am before school. These parents are something else..
The type of poverty that causes these children to be hungry has very little to do with a lack of physical resources.
Now we’re responsible for feeding the parasites year round.
I’d rather think about the millions of parents who have kids they can’t or won’t take care of.
For many of these children’s plights, we can thank Democrat LBJ for his “war on poverty” which caused many families to split so they could get MORE support money...
Fathers left their families and it just grew and grew...
Actually, in the fifties, black families were more closely knit than white families, it is said...
If these children are being neglected, why aren’t they in foster care?
A big portion of that debt, and almost all of our unfunded liabilities, are from "gibsmedat" programs like this school lunch thing.
Almost all of them CAN afford to feed their kids, but the simple fact is WHY feed them when all they have to do is fill out a card and the state feeds them for you?
What is the incentive to feed your own kids and spend money that YOU can use for your own benefit when it’s so easy to let them get it for “free”, telling them to walk down and eat like all their friends do?
We know kids whose parents make good money and still get their kids on the meal program at school. And what is so infuriating is the system that we have now WANTS them to do it to inflate the numbers, and these parents think that it’s perfectly fine to do this.
Big old bowl of oatmeal, some brown sugar and cinnamon and some fake maple syrup when mom wasn’t looking was pretty much a staple when money was tight at our home growing up. Costs is in pennies even in today’s prices, throw a couple of eggs in there when we could and a couple slices of toast and we could go all day if we had to.
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