Crazy idea: What if we just made public school lunch free?
Balancing Act
Shortly after Philando Castile was shot and killed by a Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop in 2016, his family launched the Philando Castile Relief Foundation.
Its purpose is twofold: to help survivors of gun violence and police violence, and to pay off school lunch debt in the St. Paul and Minneapolis school districts. Castile was the cafeteria manager at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School in St. Paul.
“He just loved the kids,” J.J. Hill teacher Anna Garnaas told The Washington Post after Castile, 32, was killed. “He always made sure that they had what they needed. He knew their names, he knew what they liked, he knew who had allergies. And they loved him.”
When kids couldn’t afford school lunch, Castile often paid with his own money.
Last week, Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, gave an $8,000 check from the Philando Castile Relief Foundation to administrators at Robbinsdale Cooper High School in New Hope, Minn., to erase the lunch debt threatening to keep more than 300 seniors from graduating.
“This is something that Philando held near and dear to his heart,” Valerie Castile told a Minnesota news station.
Here’s a crazy idea: What if we just made public school lunch free? For everyone?
Chicago Public Schools started offering free breakfast and lunch across the district in 2014. Last summer, CPS also started offering free lunch to kids during summer as well, through a LunchStop summer meal program set up at 100 sites around the city.
All 1.1 million students in New York City public schools started receiving free lunch in 2017. Boston, Detroit and Dallas have similar programs.
What if all public schools did?
The National School Lunch Program, established in 1946 under President Harry Truman, provides federal funding for public and nonprofit private schools to offer free or reduced-price lunch for kids whose families qualify. More than 21 million kids participated in the program in the 2016-17 school year, according to the Food Action and Resource Center. It’s administered through the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
It’s better, of course, than nothing. But it sets into motion a cafeteria hierarchy, whereby certain kids are stigmatized for needing free or low-cost lunch. And many of those kids, as we see in the cases that Castile’s foundation is assisting, rack up debt.
Feeding kids, to my mind, should be part of educating them. Just as we provide them with heat and desks and washrooms and soap and playgrounds and textbooks and all the other tools required to learn, so should we provide them a meal.
I realize this would cost money. It would be money well spent. It would be a front-end investment that would provide students a healthier, more secure school environment, eliminate reams of paperwork for school districts trying to quantify who qualifies for free or reduced lunches and wipe out a ridiculously arbitrary barrier — lunch debt — to learning and graduating. As if students from families who struggle to make ends meet don’t have enough barriers.
I love that Philando Castile’s family had both the foresight and the follow-through to honor his legacy by making sure children don’t go hungry.
I say we pick up the lunch tab — for all public school kids — from here.
What do you say, 20-plus folks running for president?
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