Posted on 10/11/2007 7:15:55 AM PDT by Virginia Ridgerunner
MAHWAH, N.J. (CBS) ― Bergen County parents are floored by a new school lunch policy. Their children were forced to eat their lunch on the floor.
Mahwah School Superintendent Charles Montesano won't let CBS 2 HD in his high school, specifically anywhere near the floors inside. Yet, that's exactly where students have been eating their lunch.
That's right. Nearly 1,000 students attend classes at Mahwah High School daily, and at lunchtime, a good majority of them are on the floor, as seen in pictures obtained exclusively by CBS 2 HD.
(snip)
Renowned microbiologist Dr. Philip Tierno warns 80 percent of all infectious diseases are spread through contact. So when a child touches the floor to sit, then touches a sandwich, whatever is on the floor can then be ingested.
"I would categorize it as stupid," Tierno said. "I would characterize it as primitive, and the scourge of third world countries.
(snip)
Even the local health department decries eating on the floor. In a letter they sent to the school, they call the practice, "very unsanitary." Yet in order for Mahwah High School to lengthen its teaching time, they opted to push all 1,000 students through a single, 43-minute lunch period.
"This allows teachers to go into greater depth in their discussions," Superintendent Montesano said.
The school would not release their own specific results from bacterial swab tests, but a parent forwarded those results sent home Wednesday, confirming the presence of dangerous pathogens like E. coli and enterococcus found in feces.
Since our interview, the school says it forbids the floor dining, opting instead for gym bleachers and other seating.
(Excerpt) Read more at wcbstv.com ...
High salaries always come first in public education.
That’s the real priority.
"Life was simpler then. There wasn't all this concern about hy-giene! In my day, we didn't have Kleenex. When you turned seventeen, you were given the family handkerchief. ... It hadn't been washed in generations and it stood on its own ... filled with diseases and swarmin' with flies. ... If you tried to blow your nose, you'd get an infection and your head would swell up and turn green and children would burst into tears at the sight o' ya! And that's the way it was and we liked it!"
BS. It gets the teachers out earlier.
It makes perfect sense to me. It’s a public school. They’re getting the students ready for when they’re homeless.
LOL!!!! Good one!
Children don’t seem to care about germs, much :-).
They certainly have choices other than sitting on the lunchroom floor, though. At least they should have other choices. Maybe they can’t let them take lunch into the classrooms (as we sometimes did, especially in bad weather) because they’d trash the rooms or have orgies.
I heard these totally spoiled brats of parents and I cringed by their demands that you and I pays for!
The next demands will be that there will be bathroom attendance wiping the seats in the stalls after every use!!
LOL, you nailed it right on the head!!!
Dana Carvey was great. What ever happened to him?
He was on Dennis Miller’s radio show a few months back.
You mean your middle school didn’t have a concierge either?
/sarcasm
After my first couple of bouts of cholera and typhus I’m at the point where I look forward to it every year or so.
When it comes to schools and daycare centers, I am not sure that I buy the unsanitary argument. ALL the surfaces in schools and daycare centers in particular compose one gigantic petri dish. I am not sure I would want to go around swabbing surfaces as these parents did, I fear I would end up a germophobe like Howard Hughes and Howie Mandel.
Didn't Dr. Tierno ever hear of the "Five-Second Rule?"
Didn't Dr. Tierno ever hear of the "Five-Second Rule?"
Though likely not intended as such, this directive fits in perfectly with the “multicultural” role playing lesson plans that we are allowing to dominate public education.
Administrators might even get grants for school innovation and empathy for the poor if they couched their decision in those terms.
Just think of all the “cultures” that sit on the floor when they eat and use their fingers rather than utensils to get their meal into their mouths. Just think of the scene as “universalist,” “progressive,” “breaking bread with our third world brothers and sisters.”
thank you for that note of common sense.. we didn’t have the germ hysteria in my youth and we somehow managed to come out alive. and really, it’s not as if they are forcing the kids to put their food on the floor itself..this is semi interesting..but really a non-story.
It isn't even a decent place to teach or learn, but it should be a decent place to eat?
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