Proposed Cuts Could Impact Queens’ School Lunch Program (Liberal Barf Alert)

Queens Chronicle ^ | 5/1/03 | Jessica Bruder

[I_Love_My_Husband]

Proposed Cuts Could Impact Queens’ School Lunch Program

by Jessica Bruder, Chronicle Correspondent

May 01, 2003 It’s Friday afternoon at Long Island City’s PS 166, and a girl is nibbling on a pizza crust while waiting in line to throw away her lunch tray. All around her, the cafeteria buzzes while kids eat their lunches, many provided by the government.    Four out of five children at PS 166, 948 out of 1,164 students in all, are considered poor enough to qualify for federally funded school lunch. But according to child advocates, many of them risk losing their subsidized meals if new legislation becomes law.

President George W. Bush’s proposed budget for 2004 issued a new call for accountability in American schools, but this time the target isn’t reading scores—it’s school lunch.    The administration hopes to weed out millions of children who aren’t poor enough to receive free lunch but, under present standards, may be getting it anyway.    The National School Lunch Program, established more than a half-century ago, feeds an estimated 28.4 million children nationally each day.    As of last December, it was feeding 57 percent of students in Queens, or 164,952 children. Seventy percent of this group, or 116,448 children, gets lunch for free. The rest pay reduced or full price.    At the start of each school year, parents fill out forms to declare their gross monthly income. Children in families earning up to 130 percent of poverty level, or $25,530 annually for a family of four, are eligible.    The problem is that only a small portion of the forms are checked for their accuracy, leading some legislators to ponder changes to avoid fraud.    “I think the school lunch program has been abused and clearly they have to do something to correct it,” said Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans), a member of the Education Committee, who agrees that stricter standards should be enforced. “They need to crack down on how they deal with school lunches, and how they do the applications.”    Comrie also expressed concern that schools with inflated lunch data are getting more than their fair share of other funding. Lunch statistics are often used as an indicator of poverty to determine how other kinds of federal and local assistance are allocated.    President Bush’s education reform blueprint calls for parents to submit evidence of income like pay stubs, income tax returns, and welfare records. When the new system was tested in 8 school districts last year, free lunch participation declined by 20 percent.    But Councilman John Liu of Flushing, also on the Education Committee, questioned the logic of implementing stricter standards for school lunches in the midst of a war and an economic slump.    “I think the Bush Administration needs to focus its efforts on homeland security and not on taking lunch away from school kids,” Liu said. “I’m sure there are dozens of other processes they could look at to make more efficient.”    With over 1,600 layoffs pending in the city Department of Education, Liu believes that stricter standards would amount to little more than a bureaucratic headache. “Whatever money you might save taking lunch away from a few kids, you’re going to squander on all the paperwork that needs to be processed. It’s going to be penny wise, pound foolish.”    Other opponents of the proposed reform, including Congressman George Miller (D-California), point to broader U.S. Department of Agriculture pilot studies from the 1980s.    The studies concluded that when parents were required to show more proof of income, such as pay stubs or notices of welfare receipt, five out of six students who were turned away from lunch programs were actually eligible. Miller worries that many families just got buried under all the paperwork.    And he’s not alone.    “To say we’re going to offer more food to kids in Iraq than kids in Queens is absolutely stunning,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.    Berg noted that immigrant families are particularly vulnerable to getting lost in the shuffle. “It will bear a disproportionate impact on places like Queens. Even people here legally are absolutely paranoid that somehow anything they provide to the government will lead to their deportation. Are we going to punish kids for their parents’ omission?” he asked.    According to Paul Rose, a spokesman for the DOE, there may be other means to make the system more effective. The DOE is contemplating matching student data with welfare data to provide direct qualification.    At PS 166, school aide Phyllis Martino doesn’t hide her concern. “Why do they want to make it harder?” she asked, while helping a little boy open his carton of chocolate milk. “I’ve been doing lunch forms for 15 years. It’s already a problem because lots of parents don’t speak English. They don’t know how to fill out the forms. I have to keep going after them.”    Raheela Shuja, a teacher’s assistant, worried about the same problems, as she sat down to eat her lunch. Shuja is a resource in the school’s diverse community, because she speaks Urdu and Punjabi, both dominant languages in South Asia.    “When they come here, immigrants, they don’t understand. That’s why I am here,” she said.    Like Berg, she worries about what will happen if children of immigrants, already faced with a language barrier, have a harder time getting lunches.    “They need lunch and breakfast or they don’t learn,” Shuja lamented. “They just sit there with long faces.”    Along with the child advocates, some school employees feel stricter standards are a direct affront to the nation’s educational mantra, “Leave No Child Behind.”    Before last February, few anticipated this could happen. After all, the Bush administration had already pronounced the second week of every October “National School Lunch Week.”    In a public proclamation last year, Bush announced, “I call upon all Americans to join... in appropriate activities and celebrations that promote all programs that support the health and well-being of our nation’s children.”    These words of hope and promise were little consolation to Jonathan Riesling, a visiting teacher at PS 166. He believes that many parents won’t have spare hours to wade through more school lunch bureaucracy.    “I have kids who are sleeping in shelters. One girl doesn’t know where she’ll be from night to night,” Riesling said, shaking his head. “Do you think her parents have time?”

©Queens Chronicle - Western Edition 2003

[I_Love_My_Husband]

The kids who get free lunch hate the food. Most of it goes to waste. Can't these welfare people cough up for bread and peanut butter? I bet they have it in the house....it's a crime imho to send your kid to school without a decent lunch, and people on welfare get food stamps, WIC, etc. They could provide for their kids. They just want handouts.

However, it looks like we're in a brand new era! Yay!

[Political Junkie Too]

Here we go. Bush is starving children again.

-PJ

[I_Love_My_Husband]

I don't think the smears will go over this time. We're armed with the internet. We're aware of their horse cr@p. We're not going anywhere, and we're not changing. In fact the country is changing towards our way! Heck, even in California (where I live!).

[green team 1999]

clinton comment- "for god sakes condemn their actions"

[lelio]

“To say we’re going to offer more food to kids in Iraq than kids in Queens is absolutely stunning,”
He seems to be missing a couple of points:
-the kids in Iraq are just getting out from under an oppressive dictator
-its not as if the government somehow caused these kids not to have enough money for lunch
-if the government taxed us less, then the parent's kids could pay for lunch

[sistergoldenhair]

They could provide for their kids. They just want handouts.

Comrie also expressed concern that schools with inflated lunch data are getting more than their fair share of other funding. Lunch statistics are often used as an indicator of poverty to determine how other kinds of federal and local assistance are allocated.

It's often the schools encouraging parents to fill out these forms when ordinarily they would not apply for aid.
I have received aid forms in the stack of forms required for registration.
The cover letter would imply that all the forms needed to be submitted to register.

[I_Love_My_Husband]

Oh yes. School Disticts practically FORCE parents to fill out the free lunch forms. They want to see how much money people are making (none of their business...UNLESS you're on welfare, imo)...and from that they determine which school your child will get into, because they can't (by law at this point) decide by race! They ASSUME that all poor people are black and brown, and all wealthy people are white so they can *diversify* the schools!

Clinton's goons, imho, are still running things.

[Alberta's Child]

It's a good thing there used to be a lot of smart, civilized people living in New York. Otherwise, most of the people who live there now would still be walking around in loincloths and peeing in their drinking water.

[tickles]

This isn't just a bout free lunch, it's also (and probably more importantly to the administration) about more money for Title 1 programs, since Title 1 is funded based on the number of low income children in the school.

Every year we have had the free lunch request form sent home and they request you fill it out even if you have no intention of using the free lunch program if your kids should qualify, and they state the importance of filling it out is it helps them qualify for funds. I never did fill one out and my kids have graduated.

[Paul Atreides]

Proposed Cuts Could Impact Queens’ School Lunch Program

Barney Frank and his trick have a school lunch program? I don't want to see the menu.

[BenLurkin]

"They just want handouts."

It is not the job of Government to feed these kds lunch (or breakfast for all that matter.)

Socialism is slavery!)

[sistergoldenhair]

They ASSUME that all poor people are black and brown, and all wealthy people are white so they can *diversify* the schools!

Not in my hood.
It's strictly about the cash.
In many of the places I've lived you'd be hard out to divide the population on race.

[texastoo]

I agree it is not the government's job to provide free lunches.

Here in south Texas all the breakfasts and lunches are free to all children rich and poor alike.

When it started several years ago, the newspaper stated that the lunch program had made a profit of one-half million dollars that year. The cafeteria workers complained that they had to have two different lines for paying and non-paying children. These lines made the paying children discriminate against the non-paying children. Also, they thought it was better that all children looked alike and you couldn't tell the rich from the poor. Therefore, they scrapped the whole program of paying. All the children legal and illegal alike get free lunches and breakfasts. By the way, George Bush was the governor then. Lunch programs are federal so maybe he will make a difference now.

I think that if one community in the US gets free lunches, then all communities should get free lunches.

[CyberAnt]

That's just what I was thinking!