Good old US of A.
To qualify as a Title I school, you need to have a certain amount of students coming from low-income households; frequently, this overlaps with the amount of students who financially qualify for free lunch. Sounds great, right? Well, when your lunch looks like this photo above, why wouldn’t you just spend the two dollars your mom or grandmom gave you that morning on 4 bags of chips, a can of soda, and some M&Ms from the corner store? (Corner store prices cannot be beat.) Honestly, you’d probably get just as much nutritional value, and it would taste better.
Free lunches such as this one are an insult to families and children who know they deserve better. In fact, for many of these students, school-provided breakfasts and lunches are the only meals they will get all day. Mental ability is directly affected by what you’ve eaten—or not eaten—and the disparity in diets between a student from North Philly and a student from Gladwyne, PA is just one of the tiny things that outsiders don’t know about when they make sweeping generalizations about what kind of attitudes our students have toward school, and how it’s affecting their progress.
My network of schools, ever willing to be progressive and caring about our students’ progress, will be participating in this program next year. Check it out!
