Don’t cut student nutrition program

Re Student nutrition program at risk, Sept. 21 Added only five months ago as part of the poverty-reduction efforts of the City of Toronto, the student nutrition program was, and is, as significant a step toward poverty reduction as there is.

If the child does not have to worry about the distraction of hunger while at school, the chances of successfully participating in the curriculum is exponentially increased. To eliminate the program by excluding 13,279 students from the program is to pronounce that these children are not worth the annual expense of $56 (average per child) to feed, and are to be left behind to individually deal with issues of poverty that hunger ultimately exposes.

As people move through life, the overwhelming personal responsibility of health related issues they have as citizens of this country is greatly diminished, when in their formative years they are denied the opportunity to encourage greater participation in, and of, themselves. When people are denied the most basic nutrition required to function in this world, they, more often than not, opt not to engage.

We should avoid the temptation of corporatization of our public schools, for to follow this track is to fail our children. It is bad enough that our politicians would concede allowing children to go hungry in order to save a few bucks (so that a rail deck park can be built at the cost of a billion dollars?), but we should never contemplate giving up on our children’s capability to matriculate.

Educating our children means feeding our children, not only with food, but knowledge of how food affects our survival as a species. To eliminate, or corporatize, the student nutrition program is to meaningfully ignore our humanity. Troy J. Young, Toronto