Weathermen have become quite full of themselves lately. They love the sound of their own voices and prattle on endlessly about what mayors and governors should do in every situation. But unlike the mayors and governors, talking heads like Al Roker bear no responsibility for procurement, maintenance, training, allocation, deployment and supervision of finite and often scarce resources, and they face no accountability for their own inaccurate forecasts. Talk is cheap. Weathermen and news readers should state their best predictions, report actual news events, and then shut the hell up and get out of the way while responsible people do their jobs under tough circumstances.
Here’s something Mr. Roker doesn’t understand (guessing his daughter goes to private schools). One reason public schools will open—even with a winter storm moving in—is because of the federal school lunch program and funding. Much of a school’s funding is tied to the number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, and the feds keep tabs on the number of kids who are fed each day.
So, if a school is closed for more than a day (and the number of meals served declines), the school faces a loss of funding in the future. That’s one reason officials in DeKalb and Cobb County, GA decided to hold classes a couple of weeks ago, despite the fact that a winter storm warning had been issued for their area. School superintendents will do everything possible to keep kids in the building through the lunch hour, so there won’t be an adverse impact on funding. It’s one of the many dirty little secrets of how your government schools are run.
After retiring from the military, I taught middle school for three years—one of the most depressing experiences of my life. The kids arrived in seventh grade without the skills required to handle basic math and simple composition. For example, most of my seventh graders couldn’t do three-column addition and subtraction, and forget about multiplication, division, basic geometry and pre-algebra. Approximately half of the school year was spent teaching the state test, in the vain hope that a few more students would pass and we could avoid takeover by the state.
Against that backdrop, the school certainly had its priorities in order. Every kid in my middle school was on the school lunch program and every day instruction stopped at 8:45 am so we could march them to the cafeteria for breakfast. Lunch was an equally important event. Most of the students were functionally illiterate, but everyone went through the cafeteria line so funding wasn’t affected.
It’s the same thinking that sent kids to school in NY and other northeastern cities today.