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.
Innocent children are not parasites, their parents are. I live in a conservative state w/ one of the most conservative governors...... Explain why they don’t cut off the gravy train of freebies to single/ multiple birth families???? As long as money is attached to baby making it will continue.
Where are all these starving children? Most all of their parents get all kinds of government money for them and food stamps, as well as most of them frequent local food pantries. If these parents do not feed their children their children should be taken away from them.
If you're referring to the $127 for food stamps, that is AVERAGE...
PER PERSON
That the government spends.
So...single parent one child...AVERAGE is $254 a month.
Each state is different.
Some higher, some lower.
Oh...ABSOLUTELY>
But the left sees it differently.
They'll say it's from the military and corporate welfare.
Oh...and the rich not paying their fair share.
Ping!
I am struggling with this.
All these children supposedly “going hungry” during the summer. Of course I want to help children, don’t you? But then I the begin to ponder what percentage of these innocent children were put in this position of hardship because they were born out of wedlock and have multiple siblings of different fathers.
Then I think of real hardship, something I have not personally experienced, of the children in other countries, where poverty does not mean going without cable TV as it does in America.
I then I think of all the trillions of dollars in transfer payments to these children via their parents.
So if I act out of emotion and donate am I really enabling the permissiveness of creating more children born out of wedlock and into hardship because, “someone will always support them in the US.”
During the school year many of these kids are on school breakfast and lunch programs...As well as the family getting food stamps.
That's to be expected.
Leftists lie.
All the time.
About everything.
Sharks bite.
Skunks stink.
Leftists lie.
It's in their nature. It's what they do.
When I was a boy my siblings and I were in a summer food program. It was called Mom and Dad. In fact we were in a summer, fall, winter, and spring food program.
I wouldn’t sentence my worst enemy to the foster care system.
I suspect that the numbers of hungry children pushed here is fake news. These NGOs lie like rugs. Govt agencies are as bad if not worse. No program is going to solve the problem of parents who won’t feed their own kids. And I doubt there are many of those who aren’t tweakers.
The parasites are indeed the parents. I was speaking broadly.
This is an ongoing in PA. Needs to be investigated!
My coworkers can well afford to feed their children breakfast but drop them off at school to eat to SAVE TIME! In the summer, they let daycare feed them.
Can anyone say womb to tomb ?
I was the only "no" vote two weeks ago to this at the school board meeting.
I don’t understand why these people aren’t arrested for child neglect. No they are rewarded for spending their snap money one everything BUT food.
The government are drug pushers. “Here you go Jimmy. Just have this free lunch. It’s free. It’s all you have. You have to come back to us. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you Jimmy.”
If you divide the total population receiving food stamps into, I assume that includes dependents, the total cost may average out to $127. If you divide those as a family who receive food into the cost I suspect the average would be higher.
For example a single mom with five dependants would receive $127 X 6 divided by $127.
I saw an ad in my local (Pinellas County, FL) library that the library, in conjunction with USDA, will be serving not only lunch but afternoon snacks to anyone under the age of 18 who shows up. No need to prove need or actual hunger. Just show up for the free stuff.
Although, on second thought, I wonder if locating this service in the library will prevent many people from knowing about it. My library is full of old people and pervs on the internet.
I know that I always did so for mid-rats aboard ship, whether I had the watch or not.
Feelin' peckish? Mid-rats!
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