For 30 years, my Mom taught second grade at a Lutheran school. There, she had students of many races and all income groups, and there, all the students were treated similarly.
Even had they not been, my Mom would have done what she did when she was 21 years old and a new bride and a new teacher in southern Alabama -- where she used some of the few thousand dollars she earned each year to buy food for her students. To this day, she gets tears in her eyes remembering the hungry kids who populated her classroom.
And this morning, she was outraged to read about the segregated lunch lines at American schools.
Many districts have a dual system like the one at Balboa: one line, in the cafeteria, for government-subsidized meals (also available to students who pay) and another line for mostly snacks and fast-food for students with cash, in another room, down the hall and around the corner. Most of the separation came into being in response to a federal requirement that food of minimal nutritional value not be sold in the same place as subsidized meals — which have to meet certain nutritional standards.
Source ~ The New York Times
Anyone who knows or understands anything about children knows that any child faced with the humiliation of having to stand in a separate lunch line in a separate room would rather face hunger than do so. And that is exactly what is happening:
Most elementary-school children like free lunches, school officials say, but by the time they enter middle school, social status intervenes. And at lunchtime, as students choose with whom to associate, many students from poor families either pay cash or go hungry if they do not bring lunches from home.
"I know kids need to eat but they don’t want to be identified with free food," said Kenneth Block, a track coach and security guard who oversees the lunch shift at Balboa High.
Source ~ The New York Times
The defenders of this segregated system say it's ok because any child can choose any line. What nonsense. What child will ever choose the "line" that leads into the "free lunch" program if s/he has enough to eat and can buy a lunch?
And, as the daughter of a 30-year veteran 2nd grade teacher, I know that NO child will ever stand in a separate line, no matter how hungry she or he is, because no child will ever want her peers to know that she is hungry.
"At lunchtime, when other kids unwrapped their sandwiches or bought their hot meals, Brian and I would get out books and read. Brian told everyone he had to keep his weight down because he wanted to join the wrestling team when he got to high school. I told people that I had forgotten to bring my lunch. No one believed me, so I started hiding in the bathroom during lunch hour. I'd stay in one of the stalls with the door locked and my feet propped up so that no one would recognize my shoes."
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Ms. Walls goes on in this heartbreaking memoir of growing up destitute in West Virginia to describe digging through the garbage to get food because she was so hungry:
"When other girls came in and threw away their lunch bags in the garbage pails, I'd go retrieve them. I couldn't get over the way kids tossed out all their perfectly good food: apples, hard-boiled eggs, packages of peanut-butter crackers, sliced pickles, half-pint cartons of milk, cheese sandwiches with just one bit taken out because the kid didn't like the pimentoes in the cheese. I'd return to the stall and polish off my tasty finds."
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Children should not be digging out of bathroom wastebaskets to get food at school.
And children should NEVER be humiliated. There is no justification -- NONE -- for creating "separate lines" for those who can afford lunches and those who cannot. To do so is, simply, to create a system that humiliates children.
And that is not right.