Shaming Children So Parents Will Pay the School Lunch Bill
Just give up.<p>If the day were shorter, students could make it through the day without eating. The loss of hours can be partially compensated by changing the school year from 180 days to 240 days. The time would be better-used because long hours make people tired of thinking, and because long vacations cause students to forget. (the long summer sets students back by at least a month) Shorter days would even save money on buildings, because there could be an extra shift, with students going to school at different times.<p>Lunch causes huge logistics problems for schools. People all want to eat at the same time. That means the facility has to accommodate a large portion of the school. The better schools might pay for a cafeteria that holds everybody, which is wasteful. The crummy schools will have 4 or more shifts, meaning that some people eat &quot;lunch&quot; soon after they arrive and others eat it right before they go home. There usually isn&#x27;t much time to eat; it can be 20 minutes for a fast-growing teen or inefficient first grader.<p>You&#x27;ll never get people to agree on a tolerable lunch. Some people won&#x27;t eat this, and some people won&#x27;t eat that, and spending the money to deliver a decent experience is just not going to happen, and all of that conflicts with obsolete-when-written nutritional mandates.<p>Nobody is washing hands. If they were, they wouldn&#x27;t be able to keep their hands clean due to doorknobs and chairs and so on. Disease spreads during lunch; this causes real harm. Nobody is brushing teeth, but some students have braces.<p>Enough is enough. School lunch is a disaster and we aren&#x27;t going to fix it. We should just admit that.