While Michelle Obama was celebrating the House vote on the $4.5 billion school lunch bill yesterday, I was having a power lunch with a couple of 3rd graders at my local intermediate school.
We're part of a national ?lunchtime literacy and mentoring program,? according to the everythingworks.org site, ?that brings groups of adult volunteers into low-income elementary schools for one-on-one read aloud sessions with students.?? Sounds good. And there seems to be dozens of affiliates all over the country.
I can tell you that?it's much more fun than the power lunches I've had in MidTown or on K Street?in school?we get to put elbows on tables, eat stringbeans with our hands, and sometimes fling ourselves on to the table to count the number of letters in ?constitution? right from the beginning of lunch. (In New York and D.C., this usually didn't happen until about the fourth cocktail.)
Yesterday, I was late and my buddy Zyonn had already eaten?or said he had. Paul still had his Styrofoam tray: hotdog, 8 tater-tots, a small pile of mushy string beans, chocolate milk. Fork? Spoon? Nope. Napkin? Nope.
Paul?sipped some milk, ate a few bites of the dog, held a single bean up to his nose, went ?ugh!,? then picked up his tray, marched over to the 50-gallon garbage can at the door, and tossed it. (There is no dishwashing in this brave new world.)? He wasn't the only one. Most of the?trays I saw being tossed had ?food???still on them.
I'm sure someone is keeping track of how much of this stuff?gets tossed every day, but as far as I can see the school lunch program is another horrible waste of the public's money:?For all the great intentions about feeding hungry people, no one is making sure that the kids eat the free food (even if you don't want to call it that).?Isn't the point of this to feed people? In my day, there was a nun posted at the exit garbage can and her job was not to smile and say?beautiful things, but to?make sure that not a single scrap of food was dumped, no matter what it looked or tasted like. And she could spot?a mouthful of peas from 50 yards.
One thing my power lunches (the ones at school) prove is that?the lack of discipline in today's schools is total:?from unimplemented codes of conduct, to ?child-centered? curricula, to the lunch line. It's whatever!
?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
