Free Lunch for Everyone: Let Them Eat Pizza (and Corn)

Sometimes we need to make sure we handle the basics before we ask people to learn.

A delight of my present state of un/disemployment is that I have time to scan newspapers, magazines, and websites for articles that pique my interest and serve as a jumping-off point for deeper thinking. My Reddit account is one such resource; whenever I want to put a finger on humanity’s pulse, I scroll through the “popular” tab on my Reddit app to get a sense of who is thinking about what. Recently, amidst the cute pet videos and ads for erectile dysfunction cures, I found an article from three years ago, “Worried Students Are Getting ‘Spoiled,’ WI District Cancels Free Program.” What could the school district give away for free that might spoil its students? No homework passes? A program that extends recess? Too many free books at the Scholastic library sale? Nope. Free school lunches…Who the heck needs food to function!? When challenged to “write about what you know,” I obviously tend toward schoolishness; there is no part of school life in which I am more an expert than school lunches!

My last days as a school principal coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. As the country transitioned into working and schooling from home, schools took on an even more prominent role as social service agencies. Two or three days a week, I would board a school bus with boxes of shelf-stable food, enough for every student on the bus route, and we would deliver the boxes to each home on the route. Every bus had staff members doing this work, and we provided breakfast and lunch foods to every student family in our district. As the summer approached and people were, in many cases, hunkering down in their homes for what would be the better part of a year, the US Department of Agriculture approved funding extensions for these free lunch programs into the summer of 2020, and later, into the summer of 2021.

Apparently, the children of the Waukesha, Wisconsin, school district became too dependent on the supply of Uncrustables and Pop-Tarts, so their school board voted in the spring of 2021 to withdraw from this program. One board member remarked that she was concerned that kids and families would get spoiled by this free food. Since not every student needed the free food help, she could not justify participating in the program.

I ate school meals in one form or another for the better part of fifty years. I think that gives me a fair place from which to comment on the potential addictive qualities of school food. With the exception of the homemade Tuna Casserole served in the cafeteria of the Manton, Michigan, elementary where my grandmother taught and was the principal,  I haven’t experienced any noteworthy withdrawal symptoms since leaving the school setting. I regularly attended summer school while my grandmother taught the poor souls who hadn’t succeeded in the prior school year; while they were proving their ability to do the appropriate 4th-grade work, I would sit in the back of the room reading every available card out of the SRA Reading Labs. The bonus was that I got to go to recess, climb on dangerously high geodesic dome monkey bars, burn my legs on the metal slide, and then eat lunch each day. And, while you would have to ask my wife, I don’t think I have become more entitled because the lunch ladies always snuck me an extra scoop of macaroni and cheese on Thursdays.

In fairness to the school board, they didn’t back all the way out of the program. They voted to withdraw from the Community Eligibility Program (CEP), available to communities with a sufficiently high percentage (usually well over half) of students who qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program because of low-income eligibility. Essentially, it becomes more efficient to provide free breakfasts and lunches to all students rather than trying to determine the small percentage of students who may not be financially eligible to receive what the majority of their classmates receive for free.

I led two high schools in my career, both of which were Title I schools, indicating that a significant portion of the students (more than half in my schools) came from homes at or below the national poverty level. Before the advent of the CEP, I would have to devote enormous effort to ensuring those families who owed school lunch charges paid them. I would deny students tickets to the prom or graduation ceremonies until they paid for every last yeast roll they ate (of course, many of these students couldn’t afford to go to the prom anyway). If they made it to graduation, they would be called out of the graduation practice line until their debt had been settled. Parents often admitted they couldn’t afford the debt or wouldn’t answer their phones, leaving their graduating seniors on the hook for school lunch payments, often in the hundreds of dollars. On more than one occasion, I or the teachers on my staff would write checks to cover these debts, which was easier than tracking down parents or guardians to elicit payment. Of course, many of these families would have been eligible for free lunches if they had had the wherewithal to complete the forms at the beginning of the year. My role as lunchroom loanshark was easily the least favorite part of my work as a principal; excluding students from activities because their parents either couldn’t do paperwork or afford to pay for cafeteria meals flew in the face of everything I believed about public education. Suffice it to say, I called “horse hockey” on this practice many times.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs lays out a pyramid of needs to be accommodated so humans can thrive. Food, shelter, and safety are the pyramid's base; the lack of these foundational elements explains why many students fail. Learning the fineries of algebra or Romeo and Juliet takes a backseat if a person does not know where their next meal is coming from. While I could add poor nutrition and homelessness to the list of things parents should be accountable for–and I do–I also acknowledge that if we waited for dysfunctional adults to get their collective acts together, we would lose multiple generations of students in the meantime (and, truthfully, we aren’t setting the world on fire even with our best efforts to fill in the gaps left by incompetent adults as it is). This is the crux of the public education challenge. If schools are to have any hope of helping students learn, we need to ensure that every student has their basic needs met. As a society–or a school board–if we decide the cost of meeting these needs is too high, and it may be, the promise of public education is lost. Attempting to teach students overwhelmed by their lack of familial resources, who come from parents who are overwhelmed by trying to provide those resources, is a fool’s errand unless we try to even out the availability of essential human resources for our students.

Which brings us back to school meals. Sadly, most schools now rely on prepackaged, highly processed foodstuffs from the industrial-agricultural complex. The notion of having a dedicated staff who love children and who love cooking for them will soon be a thing entirely of the past. If teaching our children was once something worth investing in, so, too, was feeding them. Today, we still see students arriving at school who haven’t had anything more substantial than a bag of potato chips since yesterday’s school lunch. My wife, one of the most engaging and caring teachers I have known, would have students who were chronically tardy to her first-period class because they knew if they were the last students in line for school breakfast, they would get larger helpings and more juice containers to drink.

I cannot think of a time when I have been hungry except by choice. Given the abundance of blessings God has shown me and many others, it seems a sin to withhold bounty from others while I have more than enough. Nothing enraged me more as a school principal than seeing how much food the cafeteria would dispose of daily while at the same time having students leave the lunchroom hungry because a)service sizes (ordained by federal mandate) were ridiculously small given we were feeding growing, active adolescents, and b)we sought to be equitable in the way we distributed the food, rather than designing a plan to make sure all of our students were well-fed.

It beggars the imagination that we live in the most abundantly resourced nation in history, yet have over half a million citizens living without a roof over their heads (www.worldpopulationreview.com), one in ten Americans live in poverty (www.census.gov), and according to www.nokidhungry.org, up to 13 million children live in food insecurity. Many of our leaders look at these numbers and shrug their shoulders as if there is a level of acceptable suffering in an otherwise robust civilization. While the challenge of seeing every family, or at least every student, well-provisioned enough to get the most from the educational opportunities our nation offers is daunting, a good place to start is to make sure everyone can feast on pizza, corn, homemade tuna casserole, and macaroni and cheese…at least once a week.