<p>In the Boston Area, the Archdiocese has been ravaged by the priest scandals so I don’t know how many schools they can run at a steep discount. The local Catholic schools in my area have greatly increased tuition over the last decade.</p>
<p>EmeraldKitty – virtually all charter schools are enrolled by lottery with absolutely no screening allowed. Exceptions are allowed to automatically enroll siblings of current students and children of staff and founders, though the staff/founders exemption must be under 10%. Any remaining spaces must be filled first-come, first-serve. Schools that fail to follow the federal guidelines are not eligible for federal start-up funds, which are pretty much a necessity for most charter schools. On the other hand, district or state operated magnet or Governor’s schools are allowed to use tests, interviews, auditions, and screening for selection of students, but these aren’t charter schools. A small number of charter schools that were either founded before the start-up grant era or that elected to forego federal start-up funding may use some other criteria, but that would depend on state law and their contract with their authorizing entity. In general, charters are free public schools of choice – but the choice is intended to be that of the family, not the charter school. (And sometimes a charter school violates the law or the federal provisions – this happened this June back east, and the charter school has now had to offer admission for next year to every student they turned away.)</p>
<p>Thanks for the info on charters- we don’t have them in our state so I don’t have any experience with them.</p>
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<p>This is very true. I went to school in the 60’s & 70’s. I can honestly say that there was one and maybe 2 noticeably overweight people in each grade. I see 4 dietary changes from that time period: frequency of fast food, frequency of gatorade/soda pop, processed foods appearing into daily diet and we drink less milk. (Scandinavian nutritionists have written that drinking 3 glasses of milk each day helps your body process sugars and promotes weight loss.)</p>
<p>I would add the push to low-fat diets.</p>
<p>Violating my own principals by posting without reading the entire thread, but…</p>
<p>I have worked in the administrative offices of a public school lunch program. Our district had less than 10% free/reduced lunch. We jumped thru hoops to be sure no one could tell who the free lunch kids were. We had a student account system with pre-paid accounts, and no one could tell if a kid was getting a lunch without cash because they had a pre-paid account or because they qualified for free lunch. The lunch ladies just said, “You’re all set,” or something like that when the kid got to the register. </p>
<p>However, it is virtually impossible to hide it when someone gets reduced price lunch. It cost 40 cents. The only way to keep it secret was for the kids to set up a pre-paid account, it would then get charged 40 cents each time a kid bought a meal.</p>
<p>The free/reduced lunch program is part of the National School Lunch Program. The rules are set by the Federal government, including the income limitations to qualify. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Manhattan or Mississippi, the maximum income you can have to qualify for free lunch is the same. You’d think the guidelines would account for the different costs of living in different areas, but they don’t.</p>
<p>When a school gives out a “free” lunch, the federal government reimburses them for that lunch, something around $2.25/meal. They get about $1.85 for a reduced price lunch, and (many people don’t know this) about 25 cents subsidy for every full-priced meal.</p>
<p>Among the odd rules of the federal lunch program are this: a kid who qualifies for free lunch can’t chose to just get a free milk. They have to take the whole free meal (they must take a certain number of components of the meal in order for it to qualify as a meal). They don’t have to eat it - they can give it to their friend, throw it out, whatever - but they can’t just take the milk and leave the rest. It has to do with the reimbursement system - the gov’t isn’t going to pay $2.25 for a carton of milk. </p>
<p>There are urban schools in my area with 80+ percent of their kids qualifying for free/reduced lunch. Some of them have gone to giving everyone “free” lunch. It may actually save them money - they don’t have to have someone manning the cash register and dealing with the money, counting it, etc. As long as they accurately count how many of each category of kids eat lunch (ie, today 96 free kids, 24 reduced kids and 8 full-pay kids) and submit that to the feds, they get reimbursed $2.25, $1.85 and $.25 per meal respectively. If less than 20% of your kids are paying full price, you’re really not giving up much income but you could be saving administrative costs by giving everyone free lunch.</p>
<p>If we went to a system where lunch came with school for everyone, you could cut a lot of payroll for people manning the register, counting the money, tracking pre-paid accounts, and tracking down folks whose kids have unpaid charges. </p>
<p>I’m not saying we SHOULD do this - just that it’s not as expensive for a district to do this as you would think.</p>
<p>As for the health issues…</p>
<p>Our district never had soda machines where kids could get to them. We went to whole wheat bread, whole grain pizza crust, and got rid of the fry-o-laters years ago. Our meals never came with dessert, they always came with a piece of fruit instead. We stopped selling french fries (which were actually oven-baked) a la carte, and our snacks were low-fat and met a whole bunch of guidelines. </p>
<p>In addition, we met federal guidelines which stated that over a course of a week, meals could not average more than 30% of calories from fat, or 10% of calories from saturated fat.</p>
<p>BUT - the federal guidelines also mandate minimum calorie levels meals had to meet. And these calorie levels seemed to assume that all kids were varsity athletes who were burning a lot of calories. At the high school level, meals had to be something like 800 calories! Even at the elementary level they were supposed to be about 600 calories! Wanna know why kids are fat? They don’t know what a serving size looks like, and school lunches that are required to be 800 calories are not helping that trend. And when you’re mandated to provide 800 calories but limited on fat, guess where those calories are going to come from? Carbs. Lots of carbs. (Carbs are usually cheap and easy to provide, too.)</p>
<p>There are lots of difficulties in switching to “healthier” meals made from scratch, rather than serving processed foods (ie chicken nuggets) which are simply being reheated:
- When dealing with raw meat, you greatly increase the chance of food-borne illnesses.
- Labor costs. Cooking from scratch is labor-intensive.
- Most school kitchens in the past few decades have been built with the idea that food would be mostly re-heated, rather than cooked from scratch. Our district, for example, has lots of ovens but very small stoves. </p>
<p>Again, not saying we can’t and shouldn’t improve nutrition in the schools. We can, and we should. But if it were easy and cheap it would have been done already.</p>
<p>For those that don’t know, the concept of trying to lose fat by eating as little fat as possible, for some (or maybe many) puts the body into the mode of trying to preserve fat. So you eat more and more carbs but are still hungry. Eating fat turns off the hunger (try drinking a bottle of olive oil). Two of us on the diet/exercise/health that have lost a lot of weight are using high-fat, low-calorie diets. Going low-fat is fighting brain chemistry.</p>
<p>lafalum, thanks so much for explaining all that. It was very informative and helpful.</p>